Announcing the Avinya Foundation
Giving more children in Sri Lanka the opportunity for a professional future via vocational careers
The problem
Most parents in Sri Lanka want their children to go to university and get a good, “respectable” job (which often means a pensionable government one — a different topic to discuss). Yet, of the about 350,000 students who reach the age of 18 each year, much less than 20% of them actually makes it to any university — be it state university or private one in Sri Lanka or to a foreign one.
Are the others “failures”? OF COURSE NOT!
What percentage of students should go to a traditional university for tertiary education? The US admission rate for 4-year colleges (which are what would be equivalent to our universities) is 31%; see: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cpb/college-enrollment-rate. The rate in other developed countries seems to be similar in 30–40% ballpark.
Note that the US considers 2-year colleges also in the count of college students. In other countries, vocational education plays a similar role where students attend other programs that give some type of professional education.
Sri Lanka too has a well established Technical and Vocational Education and Training system following the UNESCO TVET standards. This is managed by the Tertiary and Vocational Education Commission, https://www.tvec.gov.lk/.
However, unlike in places like Germany or Finland or Switzerland, our system consider this type of education / training as coming after having attempted to get into a university by taking the Advanced Level (A-Level) exams which comes at the culmination of a pre-university program. In fact, several vocational programs require that one has passes in particular A-Level subjects.
In other words, people in Sri Lanka go for TVET because they couldn’t get into university. By then, our society has already declared them to be failures.
University is not necessary for everyone
What the success of the middle class of countries like the US and Germany proves is that people can have fulfilling, respected and happy lives without getting a 3–4 year university education. Those who do not go to university are NOT failures.
In contrast to the A-Levels, the US High School Diploma is not a university preparation program unless the students selects courses and levels that are geared for that. The US also has equivalency programs that allow anyone at any age to get a High School Diploma. Germany too has different paths for students who wish to study a technical or vocational area and not pursue a university path.
An earlier government in Sri Lanka tried to come up with an alternative that permits more students to continue education down a different path (see https://www.news.lk/news/political-current-affairs/item/21814-13-years-of-guaranteed-education-programme-to-be-implemented-in-860-schools) as another A-Level stream, but that program has not been followed through.
How can we help children get an excellent technical and vocational education and training without forcing them to fail first? How can we do this outside of the existing system as a private initiative?
Avinya Foundation
See: http://avinyafoundation.org
The not-for-profit Avinya Foundation’s mission is to provide a world-class technical and vocational education for post-O-Level students without having to make them fail first. In fact, we don’t even need you to have passed O-Levels — we will help you deal with that later (as many things in Sri Lanka require the you have pass O-Levels).
Our plan is to admit 120 students every year to each school, give them a 6-month Foundation Program to give them 21st century life skills delivered via project based learning (think of it as an upliftment and polishing/finishing school covering English, digital, critical thinking, design thinking, creative thinking, logical & mathematical reasoning, self confidence, leadership, discipline etc.) followed by 2 years of solid vocational education.
Initially we will offer 3 separate vocational streams: IT/Software, Nursing and Hospitality. These were chosen for several reasons: the graduates will be immediately employable, they can continue their education to a degree (if they so wish), and work is available globally.
The school will not be your run-of-the-mill school. First of all, the students must be local students who can commute to school say within 30 minutes. Students will have to work (yes do a job for which they will get paid) in school, they will be in uniform, they will be given meals and they will all have a controlled phone as a digital device. There will be a “summer” break between the two years of the vocational program where they will intern at a relevant entity.
Teachers will have a classroom (as their office) and will have a tablet to manage their teaching program and the students. Teachers will have to work a full day and will be expected to teach properly. NO student will go for any kind of private tuition — if a student needs extra help the teachers will detect that and provide it. Teachers will be paid somewhat reasonably with a starting salary of Rs. 250,000 / month in 2023. The student to teacher ratio will be 20:1. The student to teacher relationship will not be one based on hero worship, but rather mutual respect and mutual empathy.
The school will of course be fully digitally operated and managed. We’re building a full software platform for every aspect of the school — LMS, student management, teacher management, operational management, etc.. Every classroom will have a video camera and every class will be recorded all of the time to be used for training and accountability purposes. All software we build will (of course, duh) be open source.
The school is not free — all students and their families must pay to attend the school. However, every student will be given means tested financial assistance. This is similar to Stanford University’s model for financial assistance: no admitted student will be unable to attend because of financial considerations.
When the students graduate (yes, graduate — that word is not the exclusive domain of university graduates), the school will also take the responsibility to place them into a job. All students will be guided to their next step.
The school will try to use its resources to support the local community as much as possible. Nothing is gained by keeping a facility locked up 16 hours of the day — so what can we do with it in the off hours? We will also engage and develop local suppliers to operate the kitchen and other services we need at scale and at competitive quality. Students will be part of these services as part of their on-campus job.
With the 3-year calendar cycle, each school will have a total of 360 students at a time when its running at full scale. The eventual goal is to have 320 such schools in Sri Lanka, one in every divisional secretariat area. At full scale, that means we will be providing opportunities for 120*320=38,400 each year students the opportunity to get a world class vocational education. That’s about 10% of the student cohort each year.
The foundation will own and run all the schools centrally via the digital platform we’re building. Each school will have its own teachers, of course, but all schools are expected to run in sync, providing us the opportunity to share and collaborate digitally and to ensure that everyone maintains complete accountability and transparency and that we deliver the same high quality to every student throughout the country.
Funding and legal structure
Establishing each school will require a meaningful amount of capital expenditure. Our long term goal is that all schools are similar in nature and that the design of the school gets iteratively improved to its optimal shape and form, much like how the In-N-Out burger chain is.
The operating cost of each school will also be quite significant considering the on-going financial assistance to bridge student fees.
Legally, the foundation will be a company limited by guarantee. In addition to the members of the foundation (who are like the trustees), there will be a board that oversees the work of the foundation which will be lead by its executive director.
I am personally providing the seed funding to build, launch and initially operate the first school. We plan to raise money to ensure that this model is sustainable and scalable — stay tuned for that call!
Status and next steps
A small team has been working through this for several months now. We plan to launch the first school in January 2023 with a full 120 student cohort!
There’s a lot of work to do from here to there .. but this is a startup and we’re in startup mode! Everything is possible and nothing is impossible.
The advert for teachers for the foundation program will go live immediately and teacher training will start in October.
The location of the first school is … (more on that soon)!
Want to help in ways other than money?
This is a not-for-profit project. (Personally I am vehemently against for-profit education of any kind.) If you have ideas and can contribute in some way please join this group and step up: https://groups.google.com/a/avinyafoundation.org/g/discuss/!
Please, only come if you are genuinely interested and able to assist. If you don’t have time right now then you can follow us via the website, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn and be up to date — this foundation will demonstrate what extreme transparency and accountability means.
Thank you to Jivaka, Anju, Dee, Samisa and Ruby.
To start something like this requires some people to take crazy risks and jump in when there’s nothing at all. Thank you guys for taking a leap of faith and helping boot this up. We’re not there yet (not even booted it up yet!), but we WILL make it work and make it scale. So many children deserve a better future than the system gives them now and we must do something about it.
