By Staff Reporter The former Ministry of Higher Education, Training and Employment Creation has been concerned for some time about the relevance, efficiency and quality of the training offered in its vocational training centres, as well as the limited number of training places available in private vocational training institutions. This was stated in a press release by the Namibia Training Authority (NTA). “Following several studies of the vocational training system, including comparative studies with training arrangements in other SADC countries and beyond, the Ministry decided that there was a need for a major restructuring of the training system in Namibia. This led to the Cabinet decision of 27 January 2004 for ‘the establishment of the Namibia Training Authority for increased effectiveness and efficiency of vocational education and training in Namibia’. Subsequently, a Project Management Unit (PMU-NTA) was establishment within the Ministry to drive the reform process,” the statement said. The Namibia Training Authority (NTA) will engage the private sector, civil society and government in reforming Namibia’s vocational education training (VET) system. “The core function of the NTA is to develop revitalized curriculum, assessment and qualifications arrangements based on standards endorsed by the relevant industry group and recognized by the Namibia Qualifications Authority. This will be supported by a more open and flexible learning process,” it said. As participation and inputs from the private sector, employers, unions and non-government training provi-ders are essential if vocational training is to be relevant; overall management of the PMU-NTA is in the hands of a Task Force comprising representatives of these key stakeholders as well as representatives of government agencies and the Ministry of Education to advise on the reform process. The main functions of the Task Force are to guide the PMU to act as a consultative body on legislative and administrative structures, to approve financial and staffing structures, to review budgets and to ensure that constructive working relations with relevant bodies such as the Namibia Qualifications Authority (NQA) are established and maintained. All the above unit standards were approved by the Namibia Qualifications Authority and registered on the National Qualifications Framework. The PMU-NTA has now facilitated and co-ordinated the development of draft standards for Automotive Electrical and Electronics through a consultative process involving representatives from industry, public and private training providers and other co-opted experts. Consultations conducted include national stakeholder workshop which endorsed the NTA approach to the development of standards, qualifications and learning materials; standards development workshops and other fora. The PMU-NTA invites all interested stakeholders to review and provide feedback on these draft unit standards for Automotive Electricians: Levels 1-4 All feedback will be incorporated to improve the quality and relevance of the standards and to ensure that they are nationally representative. Accordingly, stakeholders’ feedback is very important. The unit standard describes the requirements of the real world of work and what a competent worker is expected to do on the job. The draft unit standards were developed according to the criteria and requirements established by the Namibia Qualifications Authority (NQA). The unit standards have been grouped to correspond with Levels 1 to 4 of the NQF. The technical expert committees which developed these standards under the guidance of the PMU-NTA, conducted a lot of benchmarking against unit standards developed in other countries such as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The PMU-NTA, in conjunction with other key stakeholders of the Namibia Vocational Education and Training System (VET), will use these standards to develop flexible modular curriculum, as well as learning and assessment materials for use by public and private training providers and individual learners. The quality of the curriculum, learning and assessment materials will depend on the quality of these standards since these are the major references for all this development work.