FG to pay trainees in vocational schools

The federal government is set to pay trainees in the planned vocational education system in its effort to address human capacity development gap in the country encourage economic growth.

Tunji Alausa, the minister of education disclosed this in Channels Television programme on Politics Today recently, when he said the federal government plans to pay Nigerians who will enrol in technical and vocational schools.

Alausa said that in Nigeria, vocational schools train students in practical skills for direct employment, entrepreneurship, or further technical education.

“These institutions offer certificates in vocations like carpentry, welding, electrical installation, plumbing, ICT, fashion design, and more,” he said.

The minister further explained that the initiative will be regulated by the National Board for Technical Education (NBTE), and that the board is to enroll junior or senior secondary school leavers.

This he said is part of the education ministry’s plans to address Nigeria’s human capacity gaps with vocational skills to stimulate economic growth.

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Moreover, according to Alausa, there is a four-step plan to boost enrolment in vocational schools, including monetary incentives for students and structural reforms to guarantee positive learning outcomes.

“The government will pay students to attend the schools, fund those schools through dissertation fees, and implement hands-on training where master crafts-persons from various industries will mentor trainees, with monthly payments for each student,” he said.

He said that a national monitoring system would ensure quality training while the ministry would provide entrepreneurial grants to trainees at the end of their programme.

The minister cited instances in the UK or the US today, where plumbers earn more than doctors. Consequently, he urged Nigerian skilled workers to reverse the -reported mass emigration to countries in the global north for better living conditions.

“We want to bring this pool of workers back. So what we’re doing with technical and vocational education is that we’ve laid out a four-step approach here. We would pay students to go to those schools. We’ve modelled how much we’re going to pay them when we roll the programme out. We’ll be announcing that.

“What we will be doing with technical education will be 20 percent didactic and 80 percent hands-on training. We’re pre-qualifying the master craft persons from large industries to medium-sized industries and small industries.

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“We’ll ask you how many students can you train, 10 students? We’ll give you 10 students and we’ll pay for each. We’ll pay you for each of those students every month, students every month. We will go and come back to see that those students are being taught properly. We’ll recruit 774 performance monitor officers for each local government that will go around to ensure those students are getting the right practical training,” he said.

In addition, the minister said the ministry of education has designed a framework categorising vocational education into skill training centres, vocational enterprise institutes, and state/federal technical colleges.

“For the skill training centre, it will be six-month training and that will be open to people that drop out from school, people that didn’t finish primary school, and people that didn’t complete their JSS.

“You’ll have six months of training there and we’ve been very careful and deliberate in the kind of skills we will be training at these schools. We’ve done a labour gap analysis to see what skills are needed. We’re also incorporating a new emerging skill set,” Alausa noted.

He also revealed that President Bola Tinubu has directed him to work with the chief executive officer of the Bank of Industry to facilitate single-digit credits for trainees.

“Nigeria’s educational system is transitioning from a resource-based economy to a knowledge-based economy,” he said..