 Good morning esteemed participants to the international conference on the integration of occasional academic education. Allow me to congratulate the host of the conference, Dr. Jenna, and his team at the National Institute of Open Schooling, NIS, for having created an opportunity to address an issue very close to all of us. We are all very passionate about changing the world to make it a better place for the millions of children including the 71.6 million who do not have access to secondary education and who need relevant and quality education. Achieving the Millennium Development Goals will require a massive expansion of human learning. Traditional methods of education and training cannot address the scope and scale of the task. Over the past 30 years, change has been constant and technology revolutionized our lives. The onus is on us to harness it to learning and teaching. It is only through efforts such as this that we will move closer to achieving our dreams of education for all. In 1976, I was a first year college student fighting for equal education opportunities during the student uprisings in South Africa as there was no provision for teacher education for people of my ethnic group in my own country. At the same time, a continent of African ministers of education was held in Lagos, Nigeria, which adopted the vocationalization of secondary education as a major policy in education on the continent. Part of the declaration reads that African states should provide a new form of education so as to establish close ties between the school and work. Such an education based on work and with work in mind should break down the barriers of prejudice which exist between manual and intellectual labor, between theory and practice and between town and country. In the year 2000 in Dakar, Senegal, at the World Education Forum, participants to the meeting came together to reaffirm the vision of the World Declaration on Education for All which was adopted 10 years earlier in John Tim. The meeting agreed on six goals. Of interest to your conference is Goal 3, which stipulates ensuring that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life skills programs. However, according to the Global Education Digest of 2011, there does not seem to be a consensus on how to define the skills and which learning activities should be considered when monitoring and analyzing this goal. You would agree with me that in the absence of international consensus on a monitoring framework for this goal to assess how the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life skills programs, it will be hard to achieve. Consulting scholarly papers, I found that in some countries in Sub-Saharan Africa it was found to be difficult to prioritize vocational programs in secondary education curricula due to the high cost and complexity of these programs and the urgent need to improve the quality of general core education subjects including language, mathematics and science. Yet, in many countries in the region there is a growing demand for further learning and skills acquisition in technical vocational education and training at the upper secondary level for the graduates of lower secondary education. In fact, secondary education is becoming a growing concern and a major challenge for educational policy makers worldwide as it represents a critical stage of the system that not only links initial education to higher education but also connects the school system to the labour market according to the Global Education Digest of 2011. Some researchers suggest that vocational training should be left to specialist institutions outside general education and should be employment-based as far as possible. However, others suggest that educational policy on vocationalization must be rooted in what schools are able to achieve rather than what one would like them to achieve under ideal circumstances. What do we say about this at this conference? Is there a compromise? The Commonwealth of Learning is an intergovernmental agency created by the Commonwealth Heads of Government to encourage the development and sharing of open learning and distance education knowledge, resources and technologies. Call helps governments to develop policies that make innovation sustainable and to build systems or applications that expand learning. In a study commissioned by Call in 2007 entitled Open Schooling for Secondary and Higher Education Costs and Effectiveness in India and Namibia One of the final recommendations is Open Schools must take advantage on one of their primary strengths by remaining flexible and by so doing investing in a curriculum which is geared to address the development needs of the country. In 2009, two years later we published Perspectives on Distance Education Open Schooling for the 21st Century a publication which I co-edited. In the concluding chapter I wrote according to the Global Monitoring Report of 2009 the percentage of technical and vocational enrollments in secondary education accounts for only 6% in sub-Saharan Africa and that the report calls for more investment in such subjects. I said that a close look at Open Schools studied in this publication reveals not only that they are achieving significant accomplishments in this regard but also that they have tremendous potential in this regard. It is within this context ladies and gentlemen that Call's Open Schooling Initiative in collaboration with the Commonwealth Open Schooling Association and it took a study to explore the context, potential, challenges and implementation of integrating vocational education with academic or general education in Open Schools in five countries. Within a national and Open Schooling context we explored the following access, equity, quality, cost, financing, credibility, curriculum development, material development and learner support against the backdrop of an enabling policy. The study which I will present at the Kamosa AGM in a fortnight's time concluded with comments, some of which are with so many Open Schools in the developing world still in relative infancy with regard to vocational offerings creation of a Commonwealth repository of digital, technical and vocational content could enable Open Schools to leapfrog into the area of integrating vocational education while enabling a lasting benefit for all. So this is probably something that your conference may deliberate on. Is it a doable suggestion? The study also suggested that vocational education is meaningful and useful if it provides employable and relevant skills and knowledge to its students. This demands a more holistic approach and involvement of all stakeholders for a successful model of integration of vocational education with general education. It's critical for replication and scalability. This is a very pertinent recommendation, however we should be mindful of the earlier concern emanating from the global education digest that there seems not to be consensus on how to define life skills and which learning activities should be considered. Ladies and gentlemen, given the background of the global education digest and the call study, it is evident that an enabling policy is lacking. A policy is a consensus document. It is a grand plan and without an enabling policy to integrate vocational and academic education we will again in 30 years from now sit down and ask ourselves so why are we not there yet? Can we through open schooling use the integration of academic and vocational education as an educational reform strategy? On a more encouraging note there are examples of enabling policy environments and a possible solution for our challenge. Late last year I had the opportunity to visit New Zealand and I was introduced to their trades academies. The purpose of a trades academy is to motivate more students to stay engaged in learning and training by providing them with a greater number of options for study. By providing students with a clear pathway post-school by giving them a head start on training for vocational qualifications and smooth access to employment to improve the responsiveness of schools to business and economic needs. The trade academies in New Zealand focus on delivering trades and technology programs to secondary students based on partnerships between schools, tertiary institutions, industry training organizations and employers. Students in year 11 to 13 who are interested in a career in trades or technology are able to combine study at a trades academy for studies towards the national certificate for educational achievement and a nationally transferable tertiary qualification level one, two or three. A key priority for the New Zealand government is to help students to remain engaged in education and achieve worthwhile qualifications. The trade academies will provide their students with an integrated pathway into a trade through closer alignment of schools, the tertiary sector and industry. Amongst all of the models that I have come across I was most impressed by the work which is done in New Zealand and I hope that we can work towards similar models in the rest of the Commonwealth where open schools can partner tertiary institutions industry training organizations and employers. Gentlemen, I wish you a wonderful conference with fruitful deliberations and I'm looking forward to the recommendations of the conference and also how you see the role of the Commonwealth of Learning in realizing your recommendations. Thank you for listening to me.