TEHRAN – A total budget of 900 billion rials (nearly $22 million) has been requested to develop and equip technical-vocational high schools across the country in the current Iranian calendar year (ending March 20, 2019), Mohsen Hosseini, an official with the Ministry of Education has announced.

Describing some of the programs and priorities of the technical and vocational training organization affiliated to the Ministry, Hosseini pointed to improvement of technical and vocational training plans as the Ministry’s main priority.

Competency-based education and assessment is among the most important programs of the technical and vocational organization, which must be well implemented in all career and technical education high school, he added, Mehr reported on Wednesday.

Given that the number of years students are supposed to spend in career and technical education high schools has increased this year from two to three years, we need to assess the education quality provided in previous recent years and plan more appropriate methods for the next few years, he further explained.

Secondary education in Iran is divided into two three-year cycles: Lower-secondary education and upper secondary education, in which, students are segmented into three fields or streams of the education system: academic, technical, and vocational/skills. The academic stream which is divided into three fields of studies including, math and physics, experimental sciences, literature or humanities has traditionally been the most popular.

Students studying career and technical education high school have chosen the technical field, which before was only a two-year cycle and the students who planned to take Iran’s standardized university entrance examinations (Konkur) would attend the universities without passing the pre-university year, while recently such schools also have switched to a three-year cycle. 

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