Ursula Renold - The Swiss Vocational Education and Trainig Initiative India

Comparing the vocational education and training systems of different countries is no easy task. Vocational education and training systems are embedded in a cultural, financial, political and historical context. In the case of India, we also have to remember that its education system was shaped by the British colonial power. Although much has changed since India’s independence on 15 August 1947, various features of the current education system still resemble those of the Anglo-Saxon education system.

Ursula Renold’s and Vipul Agarwal’s description of India’s vocational education and training system helps us to understand how the VET system is structured and embedded in the whole education system. It also outlines the challenges India faces with respect to integrating its young people into the labour market.

Switzerland’s education system, and especially its vocational and professional education and training (VPET), is renowned worldwide for its successful outcomes. Ursula Renold and Maria Esther Egg provide a comprehensive overview of the Swiss VPET system. Special emphasis is laid on the role of the VPET system within Switzerland’s education framework, VPET’s governance aspects and the curriculum value chain. The authors also emphasise the importance of permeability and transition mechanisms between the different education levels, and they provide several key facts and figures.

Descriptions of the two education and training systems follow a largely similar pattern. The structure of the education system stands in the centre, made up of general framework conditions like governance, financing, coordination between subsystem actors, and the curriculum value chain describing all educational processes.

SVETII meeting during the 2009 feasibility mission, Bangalore

One of the main objectives of any educational system is to equip young people with the competences and skills that firms demand in the labour market. In this chapter, we describe the Swiss education system and its approach to integrating young people into the labour market, and explore in particular its vocational education and training (VET) system. We start out by providing some facts and figures about the Swiss education system and the Swiss economy. We then move on to describing the Swiss education system, which consists of both general education and vocational education programmes. At the same time, we touch on the transition options available and the permeability of the system. We also highlight the VET system’s legal aspects and explain its governance. These aspects form the basis of the system. Furthermore, we explain Switzerland’s curriculum value chain process, since the quality of education programmes is highly dependent on the underlying educational curricula. It is important to know how these curricula are developed, as they shed light on important aspects of the system’s high efficiency. In the penultimate section of this chapter, we discuss the financing of the VET system and round off the chapter with possible approaches for improving the Indian VET system from a Swiss perspective.

Switzerland’s population is highly educated with a literacy rate of over 99 per cent. Moreover, most residents have a post-compulsory school-leaving certificate as their level of highest education, of which 47.8 per cent have an upper-secondary II education certificate and 40.2 per cent a tertiary level degree (2014; data BFS 2015). Accordingly, only 12 per cent of the population hold just a compulsory school-leaving status.

As for the labour market, Switzerland had a participation rate of almost 70 per cent, with the unemployment rate at a level of 4.7 per cent in 2014 (data FSO 2015). The youth unemployment rate of 8.6 per cent (FSO 2015) points to the good labour market situation for young people. The KOF Youth Labour Market Index in Figure 1 shows that Switzerland and Germany enjoy high values in comparison to India and the OECD countries (for more information, see Renold, et al. 2014, Renold / Bolli 2014). It is therefore not surprising that Switzerland – according to World Bank[3] statistics – had a GDP of approximately 55,000 US dollars per capita in 2013 (purchasing power parity constant 2011) and an average monthly wage of about 6,100 US dollars (FSO 2015) in 2012. In addition, Switzerland is very active in the creation of innovations, as its first place in the INSEAD Global Innovation Index 2014[4] testifies.

These figures lead one to ask where the differences lie between Switzerland and India, and how can similarly good economic conditions be replicated? A common view, based on Becker’s human capital theory (Becker 1964), is that cross-linking of the education system and the labour market in a country is of key importance. Becker’s theory asserts that a good education system provides the knowledge and skills needed in the labour market. In applying this theory to Switzerland, we can see that the Swiss education system and labour market are in fact very closely connected to each other. The part of the education system that provides the knowledge and skills for the labour market is vocational and professional education and training (VPET), based on the upper-secondary II and tertiary level. VPET trains highly-qualified employees for various types of occupations, thus covering the labour market demands and boosting the Swiss economy (SBFI 2014). On average, two-thirds of a youth cohort choose a vocational education and training programme option leading to a Swiss federal VET diploma. The remaining third will acquire an academic baccalaureate or another general education qualification. To help provide an understanding of why VET is such an attractive option, we describe below the Swiss education system, which comprises academic education as well as vocational education and training.

Figure 1: The youth labour market situation in Switzerland (yellow), Germany (blue), India (red) and OECD countries (light blue). The higher the indicator’s value, the better the situation is. A value of 0 means that no data is available. Compiled by the authors

Like most education systems, Switzerland’s can be divided into three levels: primary, secondary and tertiary. The secondary level comprises lower-secondary I and upper-secondary II education. The primary and lower-secondary levels together form the compulsory education part, which begins at the age of six and ends about nine years later.

Figure 2: The Swiss education system at a glance. The solid line represents direct access to the next degree course. The dotted line indicates that additional qualifications or practical experience are required to proceed to the next course of study. Source: SBFI (2014)