ACCREDITATION MODELING: THE TECHNICAL EDUCATION AND
SKILLS DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY (TESDA) EXPERIENCE

Prepared by:

Elpidio D. Mamaril, Jr.
Chief TESD Specialist
TESDA, Philippines

 

INTRODUCTION

The TESDA is a government entity created by Republic Act No. 7796 signed into Law on August 25, 1994. It is composed of the TESDA Board and the Secretariat (refer to organizational chart). The Board is the Policy Making body of TESDA while the Secretariat provides policy inputs and staff work to the Board. A Director-General with Executive Offices providing staff support heads the Secretariat. Its main office is in Taguig CIty and has 16 Regional Offices and 79 Provincial Offices scattered nationwide. These are the implementing offices of its programs and projects. It has also a 121 training institutions that it administers. This is over and above the more than 2000 private institutions that it technically supervises.

TESDA was created to oversee and manage technical education and skills development in the country. The Board is mandated to establish and administer a system of accreditation of both public and private institutions. One of the Executive Offices in TESDA central office -  the Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET)  Systems Development Office function is to establish and maintain a system for accrediting the different technical-vocational education and training programs vis-à-vis the approved technical education and skills development plans.

In answer to this mandate, the TESDA Board promulgated the Unified TVET Program Registration and Accreditation System (UTPRAS) as a quality assurance mechanism in TVET. The first part of UTPRAS, which is program registration, is a mandatory process whereby TVET programs of institutions that are fee charging should first register their programs/courses to TESDA before they are offered to the public. This is to ensure that their programs/courses meet the minimum standards that are contained in what TESDA calls the Training Regulations.

The second part of UTPRAS is Accreditation. This is voluntary and this involves the application of quality management systems to the programs of the institutions over and above the registration requirements.

CURRENT STATUS

TESDA has devised its own criteria in the accreditation of programs and institutions using a model developed from the Philippine-Australian Quality Technical Vocational Education and Training Project. The TESDA accreditation has four levels to wit:

1. Bronze Award – Commitment Level
   
   
2. Silver Award – Proficiency Level
   
   
3. Gold Award – Mastery Level
   
   
4. Platinum Award – the Philippine TVET Quality Award
   

The first three levels of the award talk of programs while the highest level (Platinum) is organizational excellence award. The Platinum Award level criteria were not generated by TESDA and are taking off from the Philippine recognized award called the Philippine Quality Awards, which was patterned after the Malcom Baldrige Quality Award of USA.

To get the accreditation underway and since there were no TVET accrediting bodies in operation and for TESDA to accomplish its mandate, TESDA pilot the implementation of the Bronze Award in the TESDA TVET institutions under its administration. This was limited to the TESDA CenTExes. The TESDA CenTExes is an acronym for Centers of Technical Excellence. These are TESDA institutions that are beneficiaries of Foreign-Assisted Projects (FAPs) that are envisioned to excel in a flagship program that they have been initially identified. Under the FAPs there are 41 CenTExes that will receive equipment support, coursewares, capability building, civil works in their flagship program and the Bronze level accreditation criteria was a good test for them.

The TESDA Accreditation Criteria uses the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle of improvement as its fundamental principle and the 10 quality components are matched to these PDCA components which is best described in the table below:

The framework for the 4 levels is described below:

The Bronze Level category :

 In the Bronze Level Award, at least 5 QA components are applied to the operational areas of the flagship program. Curriculum design, development and review, instructional planning and delivery, student assessment, certification and reporting are considered core businesses of the institution. So for the given operational areas of the flagship program there must be a documentation process, a process of document control, a monitoring mechanism for these operational areas and an internal audit to check whether the systems and processes mentioned are being followed. In addition there must be a customer satisfaction process for addressing student inquiries under the student assessment, certification and reporting since students are viewed as customers of the flagship program. Other criteria that have to be satisfied are the appointment of a quality assurance manager in the institution to oversee the quality initiatives being undertaken and continuing compliance to the program registration requirements in UTPRAS.

The Silver Award category is presented below:

In the Silver Award, there should have been 2 cycles of improvement in the PDCA and at least 7 quality components are being applied to the operational areas. There is the inclusion of management review to act on the components in the “Check” cycle of the PDCA so that the procedures and processes are further improved, and the staff should have trained in quality. The flagship program should at least have ascended to Level 2 in the PTQF and performance of graduates in the national competency assessment in the flagship program should have increased compared to the national average. There is also an addition in the operational areas such as Marketing/student admission/post training services/community and industry relations and applied research and extension.

The Gold Award for Mastery Level is presented below:

In the Gold Award Level,  under the accreditation criteria, there should have been 4 cycles of improvement in the PDCA with full deployment of the 10 QA components. The program should have ascended to Level 3 in the PTQF and staff should have facilitated quality workshops in other organizations as a result of their training and experience. Benchmarking is taken at a higher level with other providers in key result areas. In the operational areas, governance and management has been included.

The Platinum Award which is the highest level uses a 7-point criteria for institutional excellence in the following categories: a) Leadership, b) Strategic Planning, c) Customer satisfaction, d) Information and analysis, e) Human resource focus, f) Process Management; and  g) Business Results. This is what TESDA calls the Philippine TVET Quality Awards, which is under the auspices of the Philippine Quality Awards.

 When the Bronze Level criteria were modeled in the 41 CenTExes, this was supported by a procedures manual that detailed the step-by-step procedures to be undertaken in the accreditation of programs to Bronze Level. A lot of capability build up was also conducted for administrators and trainors of the CenTExes for them to understand the processes and requirements well enough. Training was also conducted for the accreditors, which composed TESDA personnel in the field offices and selected Central Office staff who conducted the accreditation at the institution level. The TESDA staffs were trained in the conduct of basic quality audit. The accreditors also included an expert as part of the team that accredited the program. The procedures for accreditation are enumerated in brief as follows:

1. The CenTEx signifies its intention to be accredited by filing a letter of intent with all the necessary documents. At this stage, the CenTEx is confident enough that it has satisfied all the requirements for Bronze and in its view is ready i.e. a self-assessment (internal audit) has already been conducted by the institution and has rectified all the deficiencies.
   
   
2. The TESDA Provincial Office checks the completeness of the documents submitted. If in the view of the Provincial Office the documents are complete this is forwarded to the Regional Office.
   
   
3. The Regional Office then checks if all documents are complete and if so conducts review of all the documents. If the Regional Office view that the documents are all in order then the visit is scheduled. Otherwise, this is returned to the Provincial Office who in turn returns to the institution for completion.
   
   
4. The team now visits the school and conducts the validation. It is a composite team of TESDA Central Office, Regional Office and Provincial Office and an expert in the flagship program. The basic validation process is to check whether the processes the CenTEx indicated are really deployed in the institution or not. What has been documented is what is being practiced. 
   
   
5. The team conducts a closing meeting after the validation with the school head and other officers involved in the validation and this is where areas for improvement are negotiated including the time for rectifying such non-conformities by the institution.
   
   
6. If the CenTEx has rectified such non-conformities it notifies the Provincial Office and the Regional Office who in turn return to do the re-validation. If everything is in order then the application together will all the documents are endorsed by the Regional Office to the Central Office.
   
   
7. The Central Office then convenes the Board of Judges who then deliberates on the application of the CenTEx and either confirms or subjects the application to further re-validation if required.
   
   
8. Approved applications are then forwarded to the Director-General who grants the Bronze Award.
   
   

When this model was tested in the 41 CenTExes, 29 of them were able to meet the Bronze Award.

ISSUES

The following are the issues relative to the pilot of the accreditation system by TESDA and the attendant policy issues affecting it.

1. There is a growing consensus in TESDA that accreditation is private sector led and TESDA should not be the one accrediting TVET programs but just giving recognition to private accrediting bodies that will do the accreditation. 
   
   
2. If TESDA will still pursue dong accreditation in answer to its mandate, there is a need to review the criteria. The criteria for Levels 1-3 should be made consistent with that of the highest level. A decision has to be made whether it is program-based or institution-based.
   
   
3. If finally the TESDA Board decides that accreditation be left to the private sector then this will be the likely scenarios that will confront TESDA:
   
   
   • There are no active accrediting bodies in TVET at this time not like in higher education where there are many accrediting bodies in operation. There is a Federation of Accrediting Agencies of the Philippines (FAAP) with many accrediting bodies under its fold. There is a Technical Vocational Education Accrediting Agency of the Philippines recognized by FAAP, which has not been operational as of this writing.
     
     
   • In as much that TESDA would like to tap industry bodies to do the accreditation of TVET in their concerned sector, since TVET is work-oriented and the users of a trained manpower are the industries, industries here in the Philippines are not yet ready to take on accreditation work. There will be lots of capability building to get this thing done. It will be a long drawn process and the wisdom of the TESDA Board is needed to settle this. The forerunner of TESDA the National Manpower and Youth Council did not have a fruitful experience when it tried facilitating the forming of industry boards. When the assistance was weaned from the industry boards, the industry boards became moribund. This did not involve accreditation yet as part of the scope of work but the setting of skills standards and trade test instruments. What more when this will involve accreditation that will entail lots of leg work especially in the site visits and validation.
     
     
   • Whether it is industry-led accreditation or peer-led accreditation, the latter being identified with FAAP and TVEAAP as the officers of these associations are academicians themselves, there will be lots of capability and capacity building to be provided by TESDA because the issue boils down to “READINESS” in conducting accreditation.

FUTURE PLANS

A lot of the future directions given these issues should be presented to the TESDA Board so that they will be guided as to the strategic directions the secretariat should take. In anticipation however, the author as part of the secretariat would propose the following:

1. Open up the accreditation market regardless of whether this is industry or not who should do the accreditation and TESDA should just recognize these accreditation providers. One of the major criteria in the recognition of accrediting bodies should be readiness or the capacity to conduct accreditation. For year 2005 there should have been two accrediting bodies that have been given recognition by TESDA to do accreditation in TVET.
   
   
2. Massive advocacy should be provided by TESDA informing private and public institutions that these are the accrediting bodies duly recognized by TESDA and that they can voluntarily submit for accreditation if they want to raise the level or status of their program/institution. By year 2005 at least 10 institutions should have been accredited to the lowest level award by the accrediting bodies.
   
   
3. By year 2006, the recognized TESDA accrediting bodies should have expanded to five. These accrediting bodies should also have accredited a total of 100 programs/institutions. 
   
   
4. By year 2007, the recognized TESDA accrediting bodies should have expanded to eight. These accrediting bodies should have accredited an additional 140 programs/institutions.