## Efqui2ment

The provision of proper facilities for practical training is also cited by the UNESCO survey as a major problem faced by school-based training: "equipment for the industrial fields of technical and vocational education is very expensive, both in terms of initial investment and in terms of maintenance. Many countries also have to import this equipment, which is doubly costly and difficult to maintain because of difficulties in obtaining spare parts. Furthecmore, imported equipment is often not really adapted to the learning requirements of the students" (UNESCO, 1978, p. 106).

Schools are almost invariably under budgetary pressure not to replace expensive equipment within its design lifetime, even if it has become technically obsolete. Even in the United States, where school-based training is comparatively well-financed, this is a problem: "The kind of high-tech equipment now used in industry is not only very expensive, but the rate of obsolescence in such fields as computers and semiconductors is so high that companies themselves are often hard-pressed to keep up with the state of the art. Under these conditions getting the latest equipment into the schools is extremely difficult" (Perelman, 1984).

These remarks were made in the context of school-based training for higher-level technicians. Where the training is for craft-workers and lower level technicians, the pace of change is slower, but even so in many developing countries the severe constraints oa budgets result in creeping obsolescence which is difficult to reverse.

# Provision of work experience during training

The quality of the school-based training suffers from the difficulty of exposing the students to realistic work experience. Except in those cases where schools are actually owned or managed by enterprises, schools encounter great difficulties in establishing and maintaining cooperative schemes with industry. This adversely affects both the relevance of the training and the motivation of the trainees. Similar problems affect nonformal institutionalized training, but they are more severe for pre-employment school-based training because school programmes tend to be much longer, often spread o"er two or three years, and there is a greater delay between receiving the theoretical instruction and putting it into practice.

Recognition of the importarn:e of work experience is reflected in the highly-organized work experience provided in Swedish vocational education; in the introduction in 1979, following employers' criticisms of the isolation of the schools, of "alternance" training into French vocational education; in the rapid expansion of cooperative vocational education programmes in the U.S. in the 1960's following the establishment of the National Commission for Cooperative Education and the 1968 amendments to the 1963 Vocational Training Act requiring part of federal grants to states for vocational education to be used for the initiation of work experience programmes; and in the sandwich format (a degree course including a year in industry) adopted by the Diploma of Technology established by the National Council for Technological Awards in the U.K. in 1956, to cite just four examples.

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