The educational system, employment and unemployment in Jamaica

Abstract

This paper examines the relevance of the educational system to employment and unemployment in Jamaica. It focuses upon the most recent year for which full statistics were available (1981), which also happened to be the period immediately prior to the inauguration of the HEART programme (the government's ambitious plan to develop human resources and coordinate industrial training throughout the country). From two different viewpoints, it looks at the position of 50,000 or so individuals who left school in that year, by conceiving of them as being part of the schooling system on the one hand, and part of the labour force on the other. Overall statistics about the educational system, enrolment, examinations, and the relationship between educational level and employment level are brought together and used to make a static analysis. An attempt is made to demonstrate the need for urgent further research that will reveal more about the relationship between educational level and employment/unemployment. The paper also describes a common mental framework that sees Jamaican education as a three-tier system that is controlled by the Ministry of Education. It tries to show that this is misleading and unhelpful and should be replaced by something else