Why dualized education?

One of the issues always raised about formal education in the Philippines is its inability to supply students and graduates with the skills that employers are looking for. This is called the “mismatch” between what schools supply and what enterprises demand. Companies have to spend time and money training the fresh graduates that they hire.

Teachers do not teach students the skills we need, employers complain. The solution stares us in the face: then let the employers teach the students.

Dual or dualized education solves the problem of the mismatch. Students spend a lot of time in company offices or factories, learning how to do the tasks that they will eventually do as employees. True, in many Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) which require On the Job Training (OJT) for certain major courses, college students do spend time in companies. Most of the time, however, these companies do not know what to do with them; the students often end up just making coffee or answering phone calls or even just sitting around observing what employees do.

Dualized education in Senior High School (SHS) is different. It requires that companies assign mentors to students; these mentors have to undergo training so they will know what to do with the students.

By the way, there is no term yet for high school students doing dualized education. They cannot be called trainees, interns, or apprentices, because these terms are defined by laws that do not really apply to high school students. The term used by the Department of Education (DepEd) for the process is “immersion,” but that term does not transform easily into a noun (immersee?). For convenience, allow me to use “immersed student.”

Do we already have examples of immersed students who got employed immediately after Grade 12?

The answer: a lot.

For example, the SHS program of the Asia Pacific College (APC) features a 600-hour immersion before graduation. Since 2012 when APC first opened SHS, its graduates have found jobs in different companies.

Sarah Mae M. Duliges, for example, was admitted in 2012. She experienced real-life work during her internship in an IT business processing company in Ortigas. After finishing SHS in 2014, she was taken in as a full-time employee by the company, because she already obtained the skills needed for her job.

Jessabel Buelba’s father is a jeepney driver and her mother an OFW in Russia. During her SHS in APC, Buelba was an intern at PAC APL Company in Alabang. When she graduated, the company took her in, also because she had learned exactly the skills that the company was looking for.

Benjie Gulmatico’s father is a fisherman and his mother a domestic helper. He availed of a scholarship offered by APC. Today, he is a stockman clerk at SM Sucat. He says, “The APC SHS program made me realize my dreams. It helped me become a successful person.”

The APC experience with internship at the SHS level is not unique.

There are, for example, the SHS students in Barrio Luz National High School who spend much of their time in Cebu Chamber of Commerce member companies like Anita’s Bakeshop, San Jose Bakeshop, and Central Seafood. The school works with the Philippine School of Culinary Arts to supplement its academic offerings.

Also in Cebu, SHS students in Zapatera National High School work with construction companies affiliated with the Cebu Contractors Association. Supporting the school is Primary Skills Educational Foundation (PSEFI-SKILLS).

Education in finance is delivered through a dualized program by the Paglaum Multipurpose Cooperative in the Looc National High School.

What makes these programs work is the close cooperation among DepEd, TESDA, individual enterprises, and chambers or industry associations. By keeping the welfare of the immersed students foremost in their minds, these different entities forge a situation where everybody wins: the employers get the employees they want, the schools get their graduates immediately employed, the students get the livelihood that they would otherwise not be eligible to get, and the government shows that the K to 12 program works on the ground.

The memorandum of understanding that the Philippine Chamber of Commerce (PCCI) signed with DepEd explains the mechanism of dualized training on the SHS level.

Provision 1.1 of the MOU states: “Whenever appropriate and practical, the DepEd shall allow SHS offering the TVL track to use Dual Training as their mode of delivery, provided individual memorandums of agreement for every SHS are made by the DepEd, the private SHS if appropriate, PCCI and/or chambers of commerce and industry or industry organizations, and enterprises accredited by PCCI, specifying among others, the number of hours students will spend in a school and in a workplace, following an agreed in-company training plan.”

To ensure that all students will be able to spend as much time in a workplace as needed, Provision 1.2 states: “Whenever appropriate and practical, the Dep-Ed shall allow Dual Training as a mode of delivery in any of the Track Subjects, provided that the standards expected for these subjects as detailed in the relevant K to 12 Curriculum Guides of the DepEd are sufficiently covered.”

Dualized education has been in our country since the 1980s, but it is only now that it is formally a part of the high school curriculum.