CHAPTER IX: Impact of the Education System on Human Resources Development

Examination of the level and quality of education of the labour force at the end of the Tenth Plan (2013) offers a revealing assessment of the impact of current trends in the education system on human resources development.

Level of

According to the Bhutan National Human Resource Development Report 2007 (BNHRD Report 2007), the level of education of the labour force in 2013 is estimated as follows.

Quality of Academic Skills and Knowledge

The following assessments of the quality of education of the labour force in 2013 should be viewed as indicative, rather than specific.

Category I. LSS (Lower Secondary School)

The most pertinent question for this category of labour force relates to literacy level. Do workers in this category meet the UNESCO definition of literary, i.e., “the ability to read and write, with understanding, a short simple sentence about one’s everyday life”? In this regard, it must be recognised that the level of literacy is the foundation for acquiring skills that will bring higher individual economic benefits and enable these workers to contribute toward productivity of the nation’s economy.

However, based on results of the Learning Quality Survey, even among those in this group that have reached/completed the terminal grade of primary education (Class VI), their literacy level can only be assumed to be comparable to that required for Class IV.

Clearly, the bulk of the future labour force – 53 percent – is at the bottom of educational pyramid, with the immediate fallout of low skills levels among the working population.

Category II: LSS/MSS (Lower Secondary/Middle Secondary School)

Even assuming that this category of labour force would have completed middle secondary school at best (Class X passed), NEA findings indicate that their average scores in core subjects like English and Maths would be below 50 percent. This means, first, that they will need to upgrade their literacy and numeracy skills, and second, they will need to complete occupational/professional training that would prepare them to be considered against the shortages of skilled manpower in the country.

According to the BNHRD Report 2007, supply of this category of labour force is “likely to be in excess over the Tenth Plan.” On the other hand, as noted earlier, there also exists an issue “un-employability” in this category of labour force.

Category III: Certificates/Diploma

Data are not available to assess the quality of learning achievements for this category of labour force. However, the following observations from the BNHRD Report 2007 may give some indications regarding their level as well as quality of education:

• Quality of training is poor. As a result, many certificate holders are not employable.

• Certificate holders are highly mobile and move very frequently from one job to another.

• Salary and job expectations among this group are much higher than for foreign workers with similar qualifications.

Category IV: HSS (Higher Secondary School)

In all probability, this category of labour force may not have qualified for tertiary education because of low academic achievements in Class XII examinations. Therefore, persons in this category may lack the required reading, writing and maths skills needed to learn technical skills that would make them readily employable in a rapidly changing economy.

Category V: University Graduate

Because no agreed framework exists for quality assurance in Bhutanese higher education, and because required data are not readily available, it was necessary to examine the academic quality of this category of workforce via proxy indicators. For this purpose, and keeping in view the fact that substantial numbers of Bhutanese undertake higher studies in India, national graduates’ academic skills and knowledge are considered at par with that of Indian graduates. It should be noted that the Indian National Assessment and Accreditation Council, which sets quality parameters of higher education in India, has not accredited 75 percent of all colleges and 56 percent of universities in that country. Reflecting the state of quality of Indian graduates’ academic skills, un-employability of graduates, rather than employment per se, has emerged as one of India’s major human resources issues. As a corollary, it can be concluded that in general the quality of academic skills of Bhutanese graduates also is not very high.

Broadly, national graduates now engage in jobs that mostly involve routine work – but a real possibility exists that major components of such jobs may soon be automated with the rapid advance of new technologies. Hence, the prospect of graduates’ unemployability may also emerge as a human resources issue in the country.

Category VI: Professionals

While use of the Indian situation may not be fully in order for this category, looking into the situation there may give at least some basis to assess the quality of Bhutanese professionals. Currently, the following percentages of Indian professionals are considered employable in international terms: 25 percent of engineering graduates; 15 percent of finance and accounts professionals, and 10 percent with any kind of professional degrees. In the above context, the percentage of high-quality Bhutanese professionals would be limited. Nevertheless, India has gained a competitive edge in the global market because of the sheer overall numbers of highquality Indian professionals. Bhutan, of course, has no such advantage.

Conclusion

1. It can be concluded that the foundational skills and knowledge of the future workforce are going to be disappointingly low. It is also clear that their skills and knowledge deficiencies cannot be “repaired” simply by providing vocational and technical training, which are generally set to minimum standards and intended mainly for getting unemployed youth a job as soon as possible. In fact, these youth will need a foundation level of literacy much deeper and broader than what was required in the past, ideally, at a minimum needed to do college-level work. It is important to realize that even for agriculture activities higher levels of education is required as demonstrated by the example from Switzerland (Box 8):

Source: UFA Review 3.2007

2. In ensuring that the country’s adult workers will acquire the foundational skills and knowledge required to meet the future economy’s challenges, the following two-pronged approach should be considered:

• First, the current pilot Continuing Education Programme needs to be rapidly expanded in terms of scope and coverage. Specifically, the programme needs to directed toward enabling a much larger proportion of the adult population to achieve much higher education standards.

• Second, the curricula design and system of assessment of the existing training infrastructure need to be upgraded to meet the demands of the future economy, and coverage should be expanded to working adults. This means the national occupational skills standards and curricula should be designed in modular form so that people can accumulate modules as needed to achieve professional goals or adjust to changes in patterns of job availability. At the same time, a financial aid system needs to be in place to help workers take advantage of these modular programmes.

• Initiating the proposed two-pronged approach will require an investment of millions of ngultrums. One solution, however, could be to “piggyback” on educational and training services designed to meet the needs of the adult Indian population. For example, arrangements could be worked out to provide Indian open school and university courses in Bhutan. A similar tie-up could be made, for example, with NIIT to conduct courses modelled after its District Learning Centre, which is geared toward fostering IT talent and skilled manpower resources for global readiness.

CHAPTER X: Transforming the Education System

Premise

The overwhelming conclusion from the earlier analysis of the system is that a radical approach is indispensable to achieve a quantum improvement in educational outputs.

Recommendations

Based on the above premise, this Commission’s recommendations are outlined below, bearing in mind the following:

1. The concepts contained in the recommendations have been drawn from the reports and best practices of countries with the best education systems.

2. The recommendations are not intended as prescriptive; rather, the aim is to stimulate many variations of the concepts, given that choices exist regarding a path to be followed. This acknowledges the centrality of the Ministry of Education in initiating the reform process. As mandated, this Commission has seen its role in creating the context for debate on the quality of education in the country.

Core Principles

We considered the following core principles as forming the foundation of our recommendations:

• Providing world-class education. In practice, this means adopting internationally benchmarked standards for educating Bhutanese students. As a corollary, the international recognition of their qualifications will mean that these standards are valued worldwide.

• Ensuring equity and equality in education. The Government is committed to equality in education services, which has translated into making equal education facilities available in all areas. But because household socioeconomic circumstances affect the capacity to benefit from education services, equality of provision does not necessarily ensure all children and young people the same opportunities to realise their potential. In this sense, equality of education is far broader than the principle of equality of provision, calling for achieving a high and socially equitable distribution of learning outcomes. Given the current population trends in the country, the workforce will experience no net growth in the near future. Thus, simply to sustain the economy – to say nothing of meeting future challenges – every working person in the next generation must be much more productive than this generation, and the children more productive than their parents. The implications are very clear: The country must have both equity and equality in education.

Strategies

Seven strategies expounding the two core principles are aimed at building a sound framework to educate Bhutanese students to world-class levels. These strategies are not proposed as a collection of initiatives, but rather, as a system with its own integrity, which can be implemented in many ways. The seven strategies are:

Strategy 1 – Adopt internationally benchmarked standards for educating Bhutanese students and establish minimum achievement levels against that standard.

Strategy 2 – Improve teacher quality by transforming the system of their compensation and restructuring teacher recruitment and education.

Strategy 3 – Provide high-quality, universal early childhood education.

Strategy 4 – Achieve Universal Primary Education.

Strategy 5 – Create high-performance schools in terms of school governance, organisation and management.

Strategy 6 – Support the students who need it most.

Strategy 7 – Ensure quality assurance of higher education.

STRATEGY 1:

Adopt Internationally Benchmarked Standards for Educating Bhutanese Students and Establish Minimum Achievement Levels Against That Standard

Adopting International Standards

Specifically, adopting international standards entails:

• Setting standards of the board examinations – namely, BCSC for Class X and BHSEC for Class XII – in line with expectations incorporated in the examinations administered by the best-performing nations in the world, such as Singapore and Finland.

• Overhauling the school curriculum, including the current system of assessing students’ achievements to best fit the expectations mentioned above.

• Assessing Bhutanese students’ performance in an international comparison of student achievements. This can provide an indication of the magnitude of challenges the country needs to address to match the best students’ performance globally. For example, on the basis of such an assessment it was established that less than 1 percent of African and Middle Eastern children perform at or above the Singaporean average (McKinsey & Company, September 2007). The international assessment of students’ performance also can be carried out in affiliation or collaboration with international associations set up for this purpose; for example, the OECD Programme for Student

Assessment (PISA) measures cognitive achievement at various levels of education in several countries and identifies the main causes of differences in outcomes.

Timeframe for Adopting International Standards

Under the Education Strategy formulated by the MoE, a timeframe for achieving “international standards” is foreseen as follows: a) By 2010, student competencies equivalent to the average level by international standards; b) By 2020, student competencies equivalent to the excellence level by international standards. Basing itself on this, we assume the timeframe as follows:

• A five-year preparatory phase (2008-2013) is required for such activities as revising the curriculum; developing a new examination assessment and administration system; redesigning textbooks; improving class transactions; and orienting teachers. It also will be necessary to conceptualise and initiate the implementation of the strategies to create a base to educate Bhutanese students at international standards. Overhauling the school curriculum, as noted earlier, should including the current system of student assessment toward achieving the expectations.

• The first child to enter Class I under the adopted standards would do so beginning in 2014. At the earliest, that student would appear for the internationally set BCSE for Class X in 2023 and for the BHSEC for Class XII in 2025. In the meanwhile, a new system emerging from the changes recommended in this report – could vastly improve and reinforce all factors affecting students’ achievement, producing higher educational outputs.

Establishing Students’ Achievement Levels

In establishing students’ achievement levels, among others, the following current status of students’ achievement levels was taken into consideration:

• Overall, the rate of learning per year of children in primary education is low; it takes one more year to reach the average competency for that grade. Equally alarming, Class VI children demonstrate strikingly low achievements in mathematics.

• While more than 90 percent of students passed in Classes X and XII during the last five years (2001/2002-2006/2007), the percentage of students securing marks of 60 percent and above – which is taken as a satisfactory level of performance – is very low. This means many students are passing Classes X and XII without mastering the curriculum for these grades; in other words, students are not educated to a higher secondary-ready standard by the end of Class X, and likewise are not educated to a college-ready standard by the end of Class XII. As a result, many seem to avoid applying themselves at the college level, whereas in other countries students strive for the most challenging courses – because they understand that this is the only way they can achieve their aims.

In the above context, it is deemed necessary to establish students’ achievement levels at the primary and secondary:

Primary Education

We drew from the concept incorporated in the Minimum Levels of Learning (MLL) model in India for benchmarking learning achievements for Bhutanese primary education. This model could improve the quality of primary education and achieve a comparable standard of education throughout Bhutan. As such, MLL can be used as a guideline for classroom teaching as well as for evaluation of learner achievement. It can serve as a standard against which the progress of a child could be assessed in terms of essential learning outcomes. Having said this, the Commission recognises that Bhutan’s benchmark for learning achievements for primary education needs to reflect its own standards that enshrine today’s needs and tomorrow’s requirements for the country. MLL is conceptualised as a threedimensional model encompassing the key aspects of competency, mastery and equity:

1. MLL defines learning outcomes as a set of identified competencies essential for all children to acquire at each stage of primary education in the areas of maths, language and environmental studies. With this, conventional syllabus-based teaching gave way to one emphasising learning by all children.

2. It postulates that these competencies and skills must be acquired at a level of mastery to be sustainable. The programme goals specify that mastery can be attained when a child acquires 80 percent of the specified competencies and 80 percent of children achieve this at the specified level.

3. The element of equity implies that all children, irrespective of economic or social background, shall be able to learn up to this defined level, and that the curriculum and teaching/learning materials shall be designed so as to promote this.

Secondary Education

To establish student achievement levels at secondary level, the following are proposed:

1. Incorporation of international standards in the BCSE and BHSEC. These two board examinations thus would measure the extent to which students have mastered the “overhauled curriculum” recommended above.

2. The new BCSE would be considered as the first qualifying examination – that is, a student would be able to take it whenever he or she is ready and would be able to move on in the system as soon as s/he had passed. Unlike the old system, students could take the tests repeatedly: In a sense, no one would need to fail this examination.

3. The new BCSE therefore would set the qualifying standards that confirm a student’s mastery of the curriculum. In other words, the student would not be allowed to enter higher secondary education without meeting the standards set by this examination.

4. Introduction of a new streaming system at the higher secondary level in order to create two programmes, namely, Upper Secondary Academic Programme and Technical

Preparation Programme. The new streaming system is based on the following considerations:

• Variation exists in the learning and absorption capacities of students, and the new system will provide an opportunity for students to develop at their own pace.

• The system is intended to allow a student every opportunity to go as far as s/he can. This can be ensured through a provision for a lateral transfer of students from one programme to another. It also will cater to both late developers as well as those who need to study at a slower pace.

5. Creation of two possible destinations for students. Students will get scaled scores of the new BCSE, but these represent passing scores for two possible destinations. No one can go on to those destinations unless they achieve the appropriate score:

• The first passing scores are set to the level for enrolment in the Upper Secondary Academic Programme, intended to provide a demanding college preparation course.

• The second passing score is set to the level of enrolment in the Technical Preparation Programme, which among others will allow students to sample a range of technical and occupational programmes to explore potential fields of employment. Consequently, some students may exercise options to enrol in occupational programmes.

6. The new BHSEC would be another qualifying examination. Upon completion of the Academic Programme, students could take the new BHSEC to be eligible to enrol in tertiary education.

7. Upon completion of Technical/Vocational Programme, meanwhile, students could take Technical Entrance Examinations; if they meet pre-specified entrance standards, they would be eligible to pursue higher technical courses. Students of the Vocational Programme also could choose to join the full-time workforce.

8. An alternate route also would exist for taking the new BHSEC. A student from the Technical Programme could take the new BHSEC if s/he could secure high scores in the Entrance Examination and take the necessary prerequisite course. This is intended to enable every student who wants to attend college to be sent and, at the same time, to make sure that every student has the skills to succeed in college once there.

9. Students who choose the new BHSEC route could always detour back to higher technical/ vocational programmes to pick up technical certificates, even after joining the full-time work force.

10. Facilitating students achieving the required levels may entail the following:

• Supporting students who need it the most (Strategy 6)

• Improving the quality of schooling (Strategy 5)

• Launching campaigns to raise the academic aspirations of youth toward exceeding the current best student performance in the world.

SCHEMA FOR STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT LEVELS

NEW BHSEC (2ND QUALIFYING EXAMINATION)

UPPER SECONDARY ACADEMIC PROGRAMME

TECHNICAL/ VOCATIONAL EXAMINATION

TECHNICAL / VOCATIONAL PROGRAMME

NEW BCSE (1ST QUALIFYING EXAMINATION)

COMMON LOWER AND MIDDLE SECONDARY

PRIMARY (LEARNING ACHIEVEMENTS BASED ON MILL)

PRE-PRIMARY

Improve Teacher Quality by Transforming the System of Compensation and Restructuring Teacher Recruitment and Education

Teachers are the heart of the education system, so it should surprise no one that a 2006-2007 study of 25 school systems – including 10 of the top global performers – by McKinsey & Company found that “the main driver of the variation in student learning at school is the quality of teachers.” As quoted in the study, a policymaker in the Republic of Korea noted: “The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers.”

It also must be remembered that the World Bank Quality Survey in Bhutan found that teacher quality can explain 26 percent to 45 percent of variations in test scores in Classes II and IV. Thus, it can be concluded that much of Bhutanese students’ low academic output in primary education, which reverberates through secondary education as well, can be attributed to lowperforming teachers. Alarmingly, however, the students’ education loss is largely irreversible – so the challenge to Bhutanese society now is how to improve teachers’ performance. Moreover, how can we get the best and brightest to become teachers? The answers are twofold: a) transform teachers’ compensation and b) restructure teachers’ recruitment and teachers’ education.

Transforming the Teacher Compensation System

Recently the Royal Government has considered granting a special allowance for teachers in addition to their salaries. There is, however, no expectation that this additional allowance will make a difference in teacher productivity as measured against student outputs. This dichotomy stems from an apparent lack of linkages between teachers’ compensation and their performance. Thus, transforming teachers’ compensation may require:

1. Linking teachers’ salary increments – in particular, advances in position level – with their effectiveness as measured against students’ achievements in tests. This means moving away from the compensation system based on years of service.

2. Granting compensatory allowances, including better working conditions or housing facilities, for senior and experienced teachers willing to teach in remote areas of the country.

3. Granting extra financial compensation or improved working conditions for teachers willing to teach in schools in which a dzongkhag has recruiting problems, or in subject areas where there are shortages (mathematics, science). This fits with the idea of making teachers’ compensation performance-based.

4. Enabling outstanding teachers to be promoted, earn more and take on increased responsibilities as their reputation grows. Such teachers rising up the career ladder could mentor new teachers, demonstrate teaching methods, coach experienced teachers and lead school-based instruction teams.