The SHS tracks

Before starting Grade 11, students should already know what they intend to do for the next few years, if not for the rest of their lives.

That situation is the same as it is today. Fourth year high school students today, sometime before they graduate from high school, apply for entrance into tertiary institutions and indicate on their enrolment forms what majors they want to pursue. In other words, today’s high school graduates, who are usually about 16 years old, already know what they want to do after college.

With the new K to 12 curriculum, the situation is even better. Sixteen-year-old students still have to choose what majors to specialize in, but there are now career and employment guidance counsellors working with them in Junior High School (JHS or Grades 7-10) to help them think through the options available to them in Senior High School (SHS or Grades 11-12).

The K to 12 curriculum also has something the existing college curriculum does not offer except for a few students: a chance for many 16-year-old children to change their minds. There is now a General Academic stream within the Academic Track that disappeared from the tertiary level of education with the demise of “A.B. General.”

What are the options available to the entering Grade 11 student?

These options are called TRACKS. There are four tracks: Academic, Technical-Vocational-Livelihood (TVL), Sports, and Arts & Design.

Within the Academic Track, there are four STRANDS: Accountancy, Business, and Management (ABM); General Academic (GA); Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS); and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM).

Within the TVL Track, there are numerous strands, taken from the list of Training Regulations of TESDA.

The best choice for students that want to earn income immediately after SHS or do not have the financial resources to continue to college is the TVL track.

Clearly, not all students in a public SHS will choose the same TVL strand. Some will choose to go into dressmaking or tailoring, some into hospitality, some into welding, some into agriculture, and so on. There is no way for a single public SHS to provide all these TVL options to all their students on its campus.

DepEd has devised an out-of-the-box solution to this problem. It is now working on a plan to provide public school students with cash vouchers that will enable them to study in other schools, such as the schools that offer the TVL specializations that they want.

Let us make that clearer through a hypothetical example. Suppose Juan wants to work as a welder, but the public school he is in offers only housekeeping and other hotel-related TVL specializations. We cannot force him to be a front desk clerk, just because his school has no welding facilities. DepEd will then give him a voucher that he will present to the nearest public school that offers welding.

What happens if there is no nearby public school that offers welding? Juan can go to a nearby private school that has welding facilities. In this case, however, Juan’s parents have to shell out some money to cover the difference between the amount of the voucher and the tuition of the private school. (This, needless to say, is where the plan is not perfect, since most private schools charge a lot more than what the government can afford.)

Juan could also present the voucher to the nearest TVET center run by TESDA. This option, however, suffers from the obvious disadvantage of Juan moving back and forth between his public high school and the TVET center. (There is a solution to this problem, available through the German model of dualized education, but I will tackle that in a future column.)

If Juan realizes, while he is in Grade 10, that his school cannot give him the skills he needs for the welding career that he dreams of, he will move to another school with that particular TVL offering. We can see, therefore, that there will be a number of students moving to other campuses after Grade 10. That is exactly what is happening now anyway: students leave their public high school campus when they go to a college campus. (To be continued)