‘Identifying what employers need’, is the focal point of a dollars 40 million Higher Education Development Project recently launched by Lanka’s educational authorities, with the assistance of the World Bank.

Speaking to the press on June 23, Senior Economist and Team Leader of an international panel of World Bank higher education experts, Dr. Harsha Aturupane, said that state higher education institutions would be direct beneficiaries of this project. It would be launched in around six months from now and would continue for five years. Arts and General Science graduates will be among those who would be targeted by the project for the purpose of imparting employable skills, such as, English competency, engineering and ICT skills.

Leader Education Specialist, World Bank, Benoit Millot, clarifying some of the aims of the project said that the team was here to support the government in its efforts at making current higher education more relevant and employment-oriented. ‘It is the market that decides what competencies the student needs to possess’, he said. Besides bringing ‘good practices’ into the public higher education sphere, he said the project essentially aimed at ‘making students more acceptable to the labour market’.

The project is also aimed at driving home the principle that ‘teaching and learning’ involves the introduction of innovations and the trying out of new methods. While the project will focus on imparting modern skills and competencies in new entrants to the market force, local higher educational institutions would be oriented into being responsive to the realities of the market place.

Lead Specialist, Alternative Higher Education Sector, Sam Mikhail, said that there was a need for a balance between traditional and alternative educational institutions in Sri Lanka. The World Bank programme would aim at bringing about such a balance. While two new alternative educational institutions, which foster employable skills, would be set up in the South of Sri Lanka, one would be established in the North.

He explained that under the second component of the project, under the head of ‘Promoting Relevance and Quality of Teaching and Learning’, there will be substantial support for programmes that are ‘occupationally-oriented and needs based’. Some of the skills aimed at pertain to engineering, IT and accounting. It is hoped that this would enhance the employability of our graduates in particular.

‘These programmes in alternative educational institutions must be articulated along with those of traditional universities for the purpose of obtaining maximum results. Quality assurance would be added’, he said.

Under the second component of the project, an attempt would also be made to generate creative and innovative ideas at the teaching level. This would be a competitive component where universities would be clustered on the basis of commonalities and competition would be induced among them for the purpose of generating new teaching methodologies, for instance. An aim would be to train ‘whole cadres of assessors who would question the ways we teach’.

‘Institutionalizing Norms for the Higher Education sector’, ‘Expanding and Strengthening Alternative Higher Education’ and ‘Human Resource Development, Monitoring, Evaluation, Co-ordination and Communication’, are the other key components of the project. The overall aim of the project was summed up by Education Specialist and Co-Task Leader, World Bank, Yoko Nagashima: ‘To make all higher educational institutions in Sri Lanka reach international standards’.