Sunday Posts

Vocational Education is the new-found panacea for development problems, we are often told, as one ambitious programme after another are rolled out by High Profile politicians. I have earnestly followed the fortunes of many of these programmes, often looking from inside as well as outside, here in Britain, in India, in Malaysia, and in Africa. I have written about these experiences on this blog, mainly noting that these programmes usually represent a colossal waste of public money, offer poor education and fail to build up confidence and professional expertise among the learners. While there may be successful experiments, society-wide as in Germany or in individual cases (I have also written about the historical Bailey Schools in China, which kept the economy alive during the Sino-Japanese war), these lessons are usually ignored in the now-prevalent model of mass scale vocational education, funded by the state, delivered to the unemployed by 'providers', usually commercial org...

When we initially conceived U-Aspire, our plan was to focus on what we do best: Designing Curricula, assuring quality and managing technology. The plan was to develop a network on learning centres, across different countries and locations, which will market and deliver these training programmes. The underlying assumption was the existence of spare capacity in these institutions, and that it would be inherently attractive for them to market an additional programme, which will lead to better usage of capacity as well as help lift their profile. Several months into the project, we know that this aspect of the plan needs revisiting. We have weaved together an innovative programme in International Management, as a starting point, and built elements of branding, technology and partners around the same. However, our initial focus on India as a market meant that we were to deal with the most complex education market in the world straightaway. The size of the market, its complex regulator...