HEART/NSTA certification rate continues to climb

Dr Taniesha Ingleton, managing director at HEART/NSTA Trust, has reported that the certification rate at the training agency increased to nearly 83 per cent for the 2022-2023 financial year.

For the financial year 2020-2021, the training agency’s certification rate was 53.4 per cent while, for 2021-2022, it increased to 71 per cent. However, members of Parliament’s Public Administration and Appropriations Committee (PAAC) last week questioned why the training agency projected to certify 42 per cent of trainees for the current financial year.

The agency stated in a summary of its operational plan for the current fiscal year that “HEART/NSTA will seek to increase enrolment in its programmes to 128,255 trainees, with 53,969 obtaining certification within the 2023-2024 financial year”.

Mikael Phillips, chairman of the PAAC, asked Ingleton to clarify why the current projection for certification this year was apparently lower than the previous year.

“When we record here 53,969 obtaining certification for 2023-2024, that would have been a target that would have been much lower in terms of our target for 2022-2023,” Ingleton said.

“I totally understand what is creating the challenge here and why it seems a little bit confusing, because the 82.61 per cent is not necessarily certification in a given clean year,” she told members of the committee.

The agency has projected to spend $10.5 billion for training costs this year.

Ingleton told committee members that NCTVET, which certifies HEART/NSTA trainees, was without a council for three years. This meant that the trainees were not certified over the period.

However, she said a new council was now in place and trainees were receiving their certificates.

Indictment on agency

Fitz Jackson, member of parliament for St Catherine Southern, who is a member of the PAAC, said it was a serious indictment on the training agency that a council was not in place to facilitate the certification of young people.

He expressed disgust that young people had completed their training modules, qualified for certification and were denied their certificates as a result of internal bungling within the organisation, the education ministry or other related agency.

“It becomes the obligation of the lead agency to make sure that the commitment that we give to the young people that when you train and you satisfy the training requirement you will get that visa, that passport that can cause you to take off and some will say to become prosperous,” Jackson said.

Phillips reminded the committee that there was an issue over where the NCTVET should have been housed, whether under HEART/NSTA or the Ministry of Education.

However, Ingleton told the PAAC members that HEART/NSTA recognised that it had to change course and worked on its internal processes.

Had to change course

In a 2020 performance audit of the HEART/NSTA for the period 2014-2015 to 2018-2019, the auditor general said that, despite an increase in the number of admissions over the five-year period, HEART’s certifications remained constant at a low rate.

Given the low certification rate of 45 per cent, HEART would not have yielded maximum value from training expenditure of $30.5 billion, over the five-year period, to deliver skills training programmes, the auditor general said in her 2020 report.

Ingleton said the training agency recognised that it had to change course in the wake of the auditor general’s report.

She said the agency worked on its operations, regionalised its structures, provided financial support to trainees and “went into communities and offered hand-holding experiences to our students”.

“To date, the challenges of the past are not what they are today. We made those changes,” she added.

“We have cleared up the backlog at the level of the council with the new council in place where those issues were lagging to ensure that was done,” she said.

Ingleton said the low certification rate was attributable in part to the lack of a council at the NCTVET for a three-year period.

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