We’re changing Technical, Vocational Education, Training structure to allow for 80% practical – Education Minister, Alausa

The Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa says the ministry is changing the Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) structure to allow for 80 per cent practicals in classroom.

Alausa was speaking in Abuja on Sunday at a news conference to herald the Maiden Edition of the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) National Research Fair/Exhibition.

He condemned the way technical education had been structured to focus heavily on didactics methods rather than practical methods.

He said that going forward, technical education would concentrate on 80 per cent practical work and 20 per cent theory.

He pledged to realign the country’s educational system to meet the needs of Nigerians in the area of lifelong skills.

“We have a unique demography in the world. 220 million people and 70 per cent of the 220 million people are below the ages of 30 years.

“We need to work and give these young men and women who are energetic, ready to learn and contribute to this country the right skills.

“The way technical education has been structured is not the best because we focus heavily on didactics and we have met with the Executive Secretary, National Board for Technical Education (NBTE) to change the structure.

“We are now clearly changing TVET structure from didactics to skill acquisition, we will now do 20 per cent didactics and 80 per cent practical and that’s how we are going to move forward,” he said .

The Minister expressed the need to begin to churn out graduates with technical skills, noting that the vocational enterprise institutions would henceforth be converted into monotechnics.

According to him, enough of studying banking, business, and insurance in the monotechnics because it’s bastardising our technical education.

“This is not what President Bola Tinubu wants, there is going to be a stop to that. We need to create jobs, give life skills for young Nigerians.

“What we are going to be doing at TVET is we will incentivise people to go to our technical school, we will pay them to go to school , we will pay their tuition and build capacity in those technical schools.

“And by the time they are finishing during their training, it will be 20 per cent of didactics within the classroom and 80 per cent of learning in apprenticeship.

“We will also pick qualified people at the back end to train students and they will be paid monthly for the candidates.

“We are designing a six months and 12 months curriculum and the first set of students would be enrolled between March and April 2025 so that before end of 2025, we will be graduating the first set of students.

“And as they are finishing, we will give them entrepreneurial grant,” he said.

Speaking on the research fair, the minister expressed optimistic that the fair would address the desired synergy amongst all the relevant research and technology agencies to fast track the deployment of their efforts and results towards nation building.

According to him, this synergy will ensure that the dividends of democracy are delivered efficiently and our Research and Innovation institutions that are now scattered in many ministries are well coordinated to be effective.

While recognising the efforts of TETFund, he assured of continuous support of the fund to further strengthen and harnessing resources from the public, private sectors and international communities.

He said this was to enable talented researchers, engineers and innovators to come up with solutions to national requirement in all sectors of the economy especially the Power sector, Healthcare delivery, Agricultural development, among others.