SANTA CRUZ, St Elizabeth — He wasn’t discounting the value of pure academics.

However, on a visit to South East St Elizabeth recently in the build-up to “back-to-school”, education minister Ronnie Thwaites trumpeted the absolute importance of skills training.

Thwaites told students, parents and teachers that increasingly in the years to come, proficiency in technical/vocational areas will decide whether someone can get a job or not, and schools should play their part to the fullest.

It was with that in mind, he said, that the Government had developed a policy that by 2016, all students should be leaving high school with at least one “marketable skill”.

Thwaites told award-winning students at a South East St Elizabeth Constituency Development Fund ceremony in Southfield, that “the world that you enter in a few years” will require “technical and vocational skills”, not as “a substitute for academic excellence but alongside it, in balance with it”.

“Therefore,” said Thwaites, “I have a word for our primary schools and secondary schools … it is that we must not scorn the technical and vocational subjects and think that it is only the [academically] bright ones can prosper… we need to elevate equally the good auto mechanic, the certified plumber, electrician, welder, the graphic artist, the animator”.

Come 2016 “all of our young people are going to be examined at the Grade 11 level and all of them are going to be required to leave school with one marketable skill, at least. We can’t go on as we did this year with a quarter of our high school graduates leaving school with a certificate of attendance and a pretty picture in cap and gown.”

Two hours earlier, at Nain, during another GSAT awards ceremony hosted by the Alpart Community Council, Thwaites also underlined the value of certified skills training in the context of the much hoped for reopening of the mothballed alumina plant, Alpart.

“When Alpart open up again, it is not going to take any low-skill person to work in there,” he said. Certifiable skills would also be required for the planned logistics hub, agro-parks, and tourism expansion projects”, he said.

Thwaites also urged closer attention to the teaching and practice of agriculture in schools.

“Too few of our students in the bread basket parish (St Elizabeth) are doing agricultural science,” said Thwaites, to loud applause. “Whatever happens at Alpart… agriculture is going to remain the sustaining element of the St Elizabeth economy, I urge you to recognise [that agriculture] is not for the ‘what left’, not for the dumbest but for the brightest…,” he said.

He noted that as part of the drive to build Jamaica’s food security and reduce the US$300 million food import bill, there was increasing opportunity for farmers to target school populations as a viable market.

“This year we will be substituting locally grown eggs for imported butter fat… this year we not bothering to send to Far East to buy concentrate but we are depending on local juice processors to see how we can enrich the nutrition of our children… I long for the day when we can have enough yam, potato, bammy to feed our children,” he said.

The education minister linked his emphasis on the development of “marketable skills” to recent controversy on a ranking of schools based on CSEC passes.

“There are many students who are doing very well who are taking vocational subjects and getting certification, ‘wha bout them?’ they should be counted too,” Thwaites said. “The schools that bring them should be ranked too,” he said.

Thwaites said the ranking of schools only added fuel to dangerous inferiority complexes among students, educators, parents and communities.

He spoke of a school principal who “in her difficulty and anguish” was heard to say on radio that she had been assigned “the dregs” from the GSAT.

But according to Thwaites “you can’t call ‘pickney’ dregs, you can’t call your ‘pickney’ who going to stand up in front of you and expect you to lead them into the promised land of knowledge, you cant call them dregs.

“Your success is not getting the brightest one and making them go on through,” he told teachers. “That is no success! The success is to take the weakest, those in need and bring them to something higher,” the education minister said.

Thwaites reiterated that as minister he was dedicated to early childhood education, rapid growth in literacy and numeracy proficiency at the Grade Four level and a solid, integrated education programme with an emphasis “on getting it right the first time”.