July 6, 2021
By MTHE Communications Unit
The Minister of Technical and Higher Education, Prof. Alpha Tejan Wurie, has implored development stakeholders to give as much importance to technical and vocational education as it is for mainframe academic education.
He made the statement during a workshop on Sierra Leone’s National Qualifications Framework (NQFs) organized by the Ministry of Technical and Higher Education (MTHE), National Council for Technical, Vocational and other Academic Awards (NCTVA), and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) at the New Brookfields Hotel, Jumo Kenyatta Road.
According to Prof Wurie, recognizing the differences with regards prospects between a hands-on tertiary institution and a research/publication university in the NQFs would allow technical and vocational students to trust that their options are as useful as academic options. He pointed out that a child should be able to access a technical university from technical options without taking the WASSCE, adding that there is need to have a larger number of people in the technical and vocational sector than the academic sector to enhance national economic growth.
“The gap is acceptability; the gap is for people to appreciate the fact that technical education is not a weakened education. …our mainframe has to be how we can improve the acceptability of this educational framework” he noted.