Dual Education Makes a Comeback

After years of neglecting the vocational training of students, Slovakia is gradually returning to a so-called dual education scheme. Find out essay writing service uk. While several companies across the country have launched programmes to train workers lacking in the market, the Education Ministry is taking steps to launch the nation-wide project at vocational schools as soon as September 2015.

Source: TASR

“The aim of the ministry is to complete the law on vocational education in following months in order to create a clear framework for this type of education and to distil into it the motivating environment so the local companies take, for example, five students and provide them with the practical part of education,” Education Minister Peter Pellegrini told the Hospodárske Noviny daily in early September.

Source: Courtesy of Volkswagen

Representatives of foreign chambers in Slovakia praise the general trend and the ministry initiative specifically, but warn that the system needs to also work in practice.

Companies step in

Dual education is nothing new in Slovakia. Educators followed the scheme – which blends classroom learning with hands-on work experience – in the past, but it gradually faded after the fall of communism. More recently, however, employers are calling for the return to that system, citing a lack of work-ready graduates.

Several companies have already established cooperation with schools and train students directly on their premises. Most recently, the Education Ministry and the Austrian Embassy to Slovakia introduced the Young Stars pilot project that should serve as an example of implementing the dual education scheme in Slovakia as well as abroad, the TASR newswire reported.

“We have to pick up what is good in Slovakia,” Pellegrini told the press on October 9, as quoted by TASR, “from the traditions we are used to, and to add modern elements that work excellently abroad.”

Within the project, the vocational school in Zlaté Moravce cooperates with the consortium of companies, composed of four Austrian firms (MIBA Steeltec, ZKW Slovakia, Pankl Automotive Slovakia and HTP Slovakia Vráble), two German (Matador Automotive Vráble and Secop) and two Slovak firms (Bauer Gear Motor Slovakia and Švec a spol). The project started on September 2.

“In all, 33 students started to study in two pilot classes and each of these firms has their own students who undergo practical training there,” Martina Krišková, project manager of the commerce department at the Austrian Embassy to Slovakia, told The Slovak Spectator.

Unlike other projects, Krišková said, students start their practical education in the first grade. The ratio of theory and practice is 40:60. Students alternate weeks in classrooms and the workplace, and at the end of the school year spend an entire month in the company.

In addition to this, students get financial bonuses for their work in the firm, TASR wrote.

Also the German-Slovak Chamber of Industry and Commerce (SNOPK), in cooperation with the Slovak Education Ministry, launched a project in February 2014 called fit4future, aimed at encouraging practical education for pupils in the technical sphere. It focuses mostly on improving the cooperation between technical schools and improves the quality of practical training, helps with increasing qualifications and with job placement, according to the official website.

Ján Kokorák from SNOPK said that there are several companies that cooperate with vocational schools, mostly in the automotive, engineering, electrotechnical sectors, but also in areas as diverse as shoe-making.

Except for the chambers, several companies active in various sectors have established successful collaboration with schools in preparing the students for future careers. The reasons stated by the companies addressed by The Slovak Spectator include aging employees, but also the missing qualified workers and lack of interest from students in studying technical specialisations.

“The company therefore invested considerable effort and resources to support and promotion of selected specialisations at partner secondary vocational schools with the aim to prevent future problems with lack of qualified labour force,” Martin Pitorák, vice-president for human relations in U.S. Steel Košice, told The Slovak Spectator.

The companies addressed by The Slovak Spectator assess the cooperation positively. For Matador Group, the cooperation with schools means that they get young students, allowing them to connect theory and practice, as well as new employees after they graduate. Moreover, they can also contribute to improving the studies via training and solutions contained in bachelor, diploma and dissertation theses, company’s spokeswoman Linda Golejová said. buy cheap dissertation writing services online.

Ministry Steps:

The Education Ministry is also taking steps with three key priorities: the development of secondary vocational schools, the national system of qualifications (whose ambition is to describe 1,000 qualifications and define the basic skills and knowledge required for certain professions) and modernising primary schools.

Under the scheme introduced in early June, the school will be responsible only for theory, while all of the practical training will take place in a specific company. The firms will help evaluate the work of the students and in the end say whether they can take the final exams, Július Hron, coordinator of employers at the government’s council for vocational education and vice-president of the Slovak Automotive Industry Association, explained.

According to the scheme, students will sign an agreement with the company, based on which he or she will get a salary. If they are good enough, they will also receive a bonus. The firm will sign another agreement with the school, which will set the basic conditions for the practical education.

In return for participating, the Education Ministry proposes to grant companies some kind of tax bonus, the public-service Slovak Radio (SRo) reported. When preparing the scheme, the authors cooperated with foreign investors and foreign chambers of commerce, especially from Germany and Austria.

The ministry also works on the new law on vocational education that will legally anchor the new framework for dual education as of the next school year. It should submit the draft to the government by the end of this year, ministry spokeswoman Beáta Dupaľová Ksenzsighová told The Slovak Spectator. Testing of the dual education scheme began at 21 schools on September 2. The schools focus on different fields, like metallurgy, mining, engineering, electrotechnics, technical chemistry of silicates, technical and applied chemistry, food, wood processing, construction, geodesy and cartography, and agriculture, Dupaľová Ksenzsighová said.

Both Krišková and Kokorák consider the recent steps of the government positive. Kokorák, however, adds that the new law should also be prepared in a way it is “applicable in practice” and that sets conditions motivating companies to join in.

“Since the companies know best what they need students for and which practical experience they need to obtain during the practice, it is necessary that the schools listen and adapt to the requirements of employers,” Kokorák told The Slovak Spectator.

Post Credit: Spectator

A matter of honours

China is trying to reverse its brain drain

FINE porcelain, Chinese-landscape scrolls and calligraphy adorn the office of Shi Yigong, dean of the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University in Beijing. cheap essay writing services. Little about his ornamentation hints at Mr Shi’s 18 years in America, where, like thousands of Chinese students, he decamped for graduate study in the early 1990s.

Mr Shi eventually became a professor at Princeton University but he began to feel like a “bystander” as his native country started to prosper. In 2008, at the age of 40, he returned to his homeland. He was one of the most famous Chinese scholars to do so; an emblem for the government’s attempts to match its academic achievements to its economic ones.

Sending students abroad has been central to China’s efforts to improve its education since the late 1970s, when it began trying to repair the damage wrought by Mao’s destruction of the country’s academic institutions. More than 3m Chinese have gone overseas to study. cheap dissertation writing services UK. Chinese youths make up over a fifth of all international students in higher education in the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries. More than a quarter of them are in America.

Every country sends out students. What makes China different is that most of these bright minds have stayed away. Only a third have come back, according to the Ministry of Education; fewer by some counts. A study this year by a scholar at America’s Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education found that 85% of those who gained their doctorate in America in 2006 were still there in 2011.

To lure experts to Chinese universities, the government has launched a series of schemes since the mid-1990s. These have offered some combination of a one-off bonus of up to 1m yuan ($160,000), promotion, an assured salary and a housing allowance or even a free apartment. Some of the best universities have built homes for academics to rent or buy at a discount. All are promised top-notch facilities.

Many campuses, which were once spartan, now have swanky buildings (one of Tsinghua’s is pictured above). The programmes have also targeted non-Chinese. A “foreign expert thousand-talent scheme”, launched in 2011, has enticed around 200 people. affordable dissertation writing services. Spending on universities has shot up, too: sixfold in 2001-11. The results have been striking. In 2005-2012 published research articles from higher-education institutions rose by 54%; patents granted went up eightfold.

But most universities still have far to go. Only two Chinese institutions number in the top 100 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University includes only 32 institutions from mainland China among the world’s 500 best. The government frets about the failure of a Chinese scholar ever to win a Nobel prize in science (although the country has a laureate for literature and an—unwelcome—winner in 2010 of the Nobel peace prize, Liu Xiaobo, an imprisoned dissident).

Pulling some star scholars back from abroad will not be enough to turn China into an academic giant. Many of those who return do so on a part-time basis. According to David Zweig of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, nearly 75% of Chinese nationals who were lured by a “thousand-talent” programme launched in 2008 did not give up tenure elsewhere. Such schemes have often bought reputation rather than better research. They typically target full professors whose more productive, innovative years may already be behind them. (They also favour experts in science, technology and management; the Communist Party is less interested in attracting scholars in more politically controversial fields.)

Chinese universities have great difficulty fostering talent at home. The premium on foreign experience in China has created perverse incentives, says Cao Cong of Nottingham University in Britain. It sends the message to today’s best and brightest that they should still spend their most productive years abroad. More than 300,000 students leave each year.

Research inside China is moulded by the heavy hand of the state. Many grants are allocated by administrators who lack expertise in evaluating proposals, rather than by open, competitive peer review. Staff are not encouraged to be sceptical about existing theories, especially those held by senior staff who control resources, says Mr Cao. The result is management by numbers: academics are rewarded for the quantity of their publications instead of quality. This creates incentives to eschew long-term, open-ended exploration. “Sometimes guanxi [connections] are all you need” to get promotions and grants, says Tsinghua’s Mr Shi, who since returning has recruited Chinese scientists from prestigious universities in America and elsewhere to work in his labs. In science the Communist Party has picked six main spheres of research to fund, including nanotechnology, climate change and stem cells. But letting officials decide on research is a poor recipe for innovation.

Until recently universities routinely hired their own students upon graduating. Many staff did not have doctorates, lecturers were given jobs for life with no motivation to excel and all promotion was internal. Ten years ago, when Peking University tried to replace this system with limited employment contracts and open competition for posts, it faced such resistance from its own staff that it had to shelve its plans.

Today the signs are more encouraging. Some universities are changing the way they recruit and hence finding it easier to attract staff from abroad. cheap dissertation writing service UK. At Peking University departments now hire and promote using international evaluation-methods. They advertise jobs and academics apply for promotion and are rewarded according to their achievements.

Departments such as Mr Shi’s at Tsinghua have attracted private funding to top up salaries for tenured positions. Assistant professors at some elite institutions are paid as much as $70,000-80,000 a year, up to 80% of which comes from donations. But academic institutions the world over are notoriously slow to reform. China has more than 2,400 universities and research facilities—and so far only a few minds have been changed.

Post Credit: Economist

Lessons from Ferguson: We Need to Talk

FERGUSON, Missouri - We put up barriers to ease our fears – some made from plywood and chain link, like those recently erected to protect property in Ferguson. cheap essay writing services.

But other barriers remain invisible.

"There's that separateness, a wall," says Ted Douglas, a nursing home employee and an African American.

The St. Louis area is bracing for more unrest, whether it be in celebration or anger, when the decision comes down.

Dabbing his toast in his eggs, Douglas sits alone at a diner counter. He has good relationships with white co-workers, but when conversations turn to issues of race, he says discussions can sometimes be more difficult.

"It's a dangerous place to go," agrees Norman White, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at St. Louis University.

Why is that?

Why after all these years do blacks and whites still struggle to have honest conversations about race, until the pressure builds and bursts like it has in Ferguson?

Douglas ponders the question and offers this: "The things that I've heard white folks say about black people, even sometimes when it may be true, it hurts. dissertation writing help. That may be one reason people don't talk," he says.

Mike Huffendick, who is white, says he has conversations on many subjects with his African American co-workers, but acknowledges there are barriers that can't be crossed.

"I don't know what it's like to be a black man when the police are hassling you, or what not, so I don't know where they're coming from so I don't completely understand it," Huffendick says.

Ekene Okafor, who is black, and a student at Saint Louis University, believes some of the difficulty exists in preconceived, and often incorrect, notions. "I know so many blacks that just like, just have an idea of what white people in general think about them," he says.

Norman White speaks often of race in front of his students. "As criminal justice students you guys are like critical," he passionately tells one of his classes.

"I just kind of see this undertone," says Germaine Gregory, one of White's African American students, who then tells a story about her son being stopped by police while driving. She says there was no reason for the officer to stop him, other than his race.

Natalie Conners, a white students, points out that people of all races form their opinions on past experiences. "I feel that's been forgotten about," she says, "that this is like a two way street."

It's conversation White encourages in his classrooms, but that doesn't always come easily.

White says some of his students are afraid to share their personal thoughts on the role race plays in criminal justice, "because they're afraid that when they raise those issues in class, other people will think of them in bad ways, that they will judge them, they will label them."

To be labeled a racist, says White, is "the last thing you want to be on a college campus."

Yet that fear of engagement in honest conversation, says White, only makes things worse down the road.

"If they can't address the issue of race here, how will they address it when they become police officers, or corrections officers, or probation officers?" asks White.

White says the problem is further exacerbated by the separation between blacks and whites that still exists in many neighborhoods and schools.

"Not having that social interaction just creates this circumstance where it's really difficult to know how to talk to each other," he says.

That's not a problem for Okafor and his good friend Patrick Sweeney, who is white. The SLU bio-chemistry students are engaged in easy conversation at the campus student center.

Says Sweeney, "When you know somebody well enough he knows that whatever I say that might come off as offensive is not intending to be offensive at all."

"That happens a lot," says Okafor, concurring.

Peter Kohlberg, another sprinkler fitter, on his lunch break with Huffendick, throws up his hands. He is white and no fan of stifled conversations. "You can't walk around life like, 'I'm scared to talk to anybody about anything.' You've got to be able to talk or you get stuck in this rut we're in."

A few miles away, Sharon Randall and Barbara Hughes sit on a bus bench in Ferguson, impeccably dressed, warm smiles and African American.

"That's just the way I am," says Randall, "you give me a smile, I'm going to give you a smile back.

Both women have neighbors who are white. They insist no conversation is off limits.

"Even when the situation happened here," says Randall, "the lady that I work with, you know, she's Caucasian, and she just asked me, 'How are you doing?' That's a human question, that's not a black and white question. It made me feel good."

A white man, with a stick and a bucket of litter, approaches in the distance.

"That's Paul," says Hughes. "He does this every day, he cleans the neighborhood."

Paul Beins comes closer and the neighbors are quickly engaged in conversation."It's a matter of relationships," says Beins. Randall and Hughes nod in agreement.

They talk about the recent strife in Ferguson. Their honest exchange and ease with each other could be so instructive if others would listen.

"Until we get to know one another, we're going to have this problem constantly," says Beins.

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SNP's education minister blames No vote for school cuts

Mike Russell is accused of passing the buck after suggesting Scots who opposed independence are responsible for falling teacher numbers and cuts in education budgets. cheap dissertation writing service best for dissertation assistance.

Mike Russell has blamed education cuts on the No vote in the independence referendum Photo: PA

Scotland’s Education Minister has been accused of passing the buck for budget cutbacks in schools as he blamed the No vote in the independence referendum.

Despite education already being devolved to Holyrood, Mike Russell attributed the drop in funding to Scots’ decision to reject separation and attacked a Labour MSP for defending the UK “system”.

During a prickly performance in front of the Scottish Parliament’s education committee, Mr Russell also blamed Westminster and the leaders of Labour-run local authorities for a sharp decline in teacher numbers.

His responses prompted Neil Bibby, a Labour member of the committee, to suggest that the Education Minister was passing the buck.

The exchanges occurred as a report published today warned state pupils are not being given the science equipment and resources they need to meet the requirements of the new curriculum.

In a major blow to Mr Russell’s claims that Westminster is to blame, the survey found that 38 per cent more is spent per secondary pupil teaching science in England than north of the Border.

Councils get the bulk of their funding from the Scottish Government and are likely to spend about £4.1 billion on schools in 2014/15, down five per cent over the past three years. dissertation writing services. Among the cutbacks being considered are teacher numbers, shortening the school week and getting pupil to help run school libraries.

Mr Russell told the committee he still wanted to increase teacher numbers but, when challenged by Mr Bibby, refused to commit to providing councils with more money and blamed the referendum result.

“If possible, I would provide additional resource. Mr Bibby, you also support a system that has borne down on the Scottish Government’s resource so you should take some responsibility yourself for the financial pressures that exist in Scotland,” he said.

“You campaigned recently for a system that drives down the Scottish budget and you can shift in your seat all you want, Mr Bibby, that’s the reality.”

The Labour MSP said he did not want to re-fight the referendum but pointed out that the oil price has since plummeted to $82 per barrel compared to the Scottish Government’s assumption before the vote of $110.

Alistair Carmichael, the Scottish Secretary, warned last week this drop would have punched a £9 billion financial black hole in a separate Scotland’s public finances.

But Mr Russell said: “You are still a friend of a system that is driving down the Scottish Budget. You can’t avoid it, Mr Bibby.”

Stewart Maxwell, the committee convener, was forced to intervene to stop the row, saying he also did not want to rerun the referendum, but the minister continued to blame Westminster-imposed austerity and Labour-run local authorities for the cut in teacher numbers since 2007.

At one point Mr Bibby responded: “It’s quite interesting that when I’m raising issues about education in Scotland, the education secretary says ‘raise it with somebody else.’”

Speaking afterwards, he added: “The SNP are failing on education and responsibility for this lies squarely with Mike Russell.”

It emerged last week there are 4,000 fewer teachers, 140,000 fewer people at college and 3,000 fewer children from deprived communities at university compared to when the SNP took power in 2007.

Meanwhile, the Learned Societies’ Group on Scottish Science Education (LSG), a collaboration of learned scientific societies and professional bodies, published a survey of teachers from 39 primary and 46 secondary schools.

It found that only £1.62 was spent per Scottish primary pupil on science in the 2013/14 academic year compared to £2.89 in England. The figures for secondary schools were £7.33 and £10.12 respectively.

More than 80 per cent of secondary schools indicated that they are not confident in having enough equipment to deliver practical science work effectively over the next two years. In primary schools, 45 per cent of teachers reported having no access to safety equipment or an appropriate area.

Post Credit: Telegraph

Former homeless addict turned professor wins national dissertation award

ST. JOHN'S, N.L. - Eric Weissman spent 10 years starting in his mid-20s as a booze and cocaine-addicted couch surfer in Toronto who sometimes slept outside. UK Dissertation Services is the best place to get top rated dissertation help online.

On Tuesday, the 53-year-old sociology professor received a national award for a PhD study on homelessness drawn in part from what he has called his own disaster.

Eric Weissman gestures during an interview with The Canadian Press in St. John's, N.L. on Tuesday Oct. 28, 2014. The former homeless addict has won a national award for one of the best PhD studies in Canada.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Daly

Weissman got the 2014 Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Canadian Association of Graduate Studies. It recognized his 13-year multimedia project comparing government housing with shanty towns and other communities set up by homeless residents in Toronto's former tent city and in the U.S.

"I come from a good background but I ended up becoming incapable of looking after myself," he said of his descent from a well paid university graduate to an addict on welfare.

He was 33 when his older sister, Andrea Weissman-Daniels, found him still sleeping at one o'clock one afternoon and convinced him to get help.

It took stints in detox, treatment centres and full-on rehab before Weissman cleaned up. Key to his recovery was an Ontario government-funded transitional housing program, he said.

He had access to counsellors, group therapy and structure.

"That's the kind of thing some people need."

Soon after Weissman got his own life back on track, he began filming the stories of people he got to know in Toronto's tent city. The waterfront community sprang up on the edge of the harbour in the winter of 1998 and existed until about 125 residents were evicted in September 2002.

Weissman made a film shown as part of an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum that ultimately helped him get back to his long abandoned PhD ambitions. He entered Concordia University in Montreal and studied shanty towns and other communities set up by homeless residents in Oregon and Texas.

A central question he poses in his ongoing research is whether there's a place in Canada for such housing alternatives.

"If we're not going to commit the money to taking people literally off the streets and putting them into housing then, for at least the next 20 years, there's going to be a group of people on the streets at all times," said Weissman, who teaches at the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, B.C.

"What room is there for these alternative spaces? That's what I ask."

Weissman also stresses the need for mental health supports, especially since community services that were meant to replace defunct institutions haven't kept pace with need.

"Most of the people on the streets that I meet need support and they need housing. You can't get better without either, and they don't have them."

Stephen Gaetz, a professor at York University in Toronto and director of the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness, echoed that thought.

"We need to do things differently," he said in an interview. "We need to focus on preventing people from becoming homeless in the first place. And just as importantly, we need to have models of accommodations and supports to move people out of homelessness as quickly as possible."

Shelters and other emergency-style approaches can exacerbate mental illness and addiction issues that rack up police, corrections and health costs, Gaetz said.

Rather than insist a person prove they're ready for housing, it makes more sense to first provide that security, he added.

"That approach must be built around a system of care where the services are integrated and we help people move forward with their lives."

At least 30,000 Canadians are homeless on any given night while many more are considered among "the hidden homeless" who rely on friends or relatives for shelter, according to "The State of Homelessness in Canada 2013." The report was compiled by the Canadian Homelessness Research Network and the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.

Weissman said more affordable housing is crucial along with a more humane approach for those who won't easily fit into one program or another.

"Some people are so damaged you can't expect them to come back into the world the way you and I would approach it. It's just not fair."

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