Exorbitant fees
To protect parents from exorbitant fees charged by secondary schools that have routinely violated Government fee guidelines, a new legislation will be passed to enforce caps with heavy penalties for the non-compliant.Another proposal to control fees is to “regularly review and rationalise fees in secondary schools in order to reduce the cost burden on parents and communities.”To improve access to university education, the document proposes establishment of specialised universities to train undergraduate students only and increase enrollment.
It calls for expansion of facilities in newly created university colleges through low-cost loans to public institutions for capital development as well as requiring varsities to diversify their sources of income.The shift to a competence-based curriculum will necessitate reforming the secondary school curriculum, with emphasis shifting from knowledge reproduction to knowledge production, with ICT at the centre of the changes.These are among steps to ensure students who go through the system acquire technical, industrial, vocational and entrepreneurship training to better their chances of securing jobs.
“As universities decide the right balance of courses to offer, there should be an overarching concern to promote the life chances and employability of graduates,” reads the document.“In the CBET programme, the trainee earns a competency by completing a determined number of courses in a module where each module comprises a complete employable skill and a certificate of competence is awarded,” the document states, referring to Competency Based Education and Training (CBET).
The document is also meant to “offer direction in modernising and re-branding the country’s education and training sector.”
