6. Production Unit

One of the aims of the 1984 senior technical and vocational education curriculum was the development of self-attitude and the ability of being entrepreneurial. Although the curriculum has a vital portion (40 percent) of practical work compared with the earlier curriculum, the success of the entrepreneurship and self-attitude should be supported by real activities in the real work.

Practical work in the workshop consumes a lot of money, while operational cost for purchasing materials, maintenance and repair is very limited. In addition, the practical work results cannot be utilised due to the inappropriateness of the suitability of production value. For the efficiency of the technical and vocational education it will be worthwhile if the practical activities could facilitate the breed and student in acquiring the self-attitude and entrepreneurship. These activities are called PRODUCTION UNIT.

Production unit of a school should have activities for producing goods or giving services by utilising all the resources at the school. Simultaneously it could cover the activities of the existing programs in the school and in turn could be a good place for doing the workshop practice in the teaching and learning process. The production unit has to be taken seriously, so that all managing personnel should have entrepreneurial skills and commercially-based managerial skill. For the effectiveness of production unit, the cooperation of schools and industry should continuously be made.

Through production unit at school the following advantages could be achieved:

· the process of guiding and appreciation development of attitude value and self-behaviour and entrepreneurship of the student

· the process of matching student competencies to the standard competencies of the world of work

· a real effort of obtaining funds for educational process

The concept of production units in the agricultural schools was formalised with December 1986 guidelines of Directorate of Technical and Vocational Education (DTVE) on the development of production units in agricultural schools. The concept carries the dual objectives of providing practical laboratories for agricultural skills training of students and generating income to augment the school financial resources for sustaining operations and maintenance. In addition to gaining agricultural scale, students earn credits in the form of exemption from school tuition fees based on school income derived from what has been produced by students on a curricular basis. Students earn extra income for their involvement as available and as needed in the operation of production units after school hours.

The actual widespread implementation of agricultural schools’ production units started in 1988-1989 as the result of the July 1987 instructions from the Regional offices on how to establish the production units. An average of 50 million Rupiahs (equal to US$25 000) per school was earmarked as DTVE investment for this activity to pave the way for development of school self-reliance under PELITA V (19898-1994). Actual releases of fund were based on merits of proposed projects submitted by schools. Evaluation was done by Regional Offices following DTVE criteria on project profitability, contribution to the learning process of students, and significance to the community, especially the farmers.

The production unit in agricultural secondary schools is the integration of production and processing aspects of agronomic and horticultural crops for crops cluster; ruminant and non-ruminant animals for the animal husbandry cluster; and marine, brackish water and fresh water fish culture for Fisheries. Besides agricultural schools, most of technical and vocational schools have conducted production unit, although in simple ways and not well organised.

Through the Ministerial decree, as stated above, production unit at school that is professionally managed can be considered as a means of professional skills training.

In November 1993, a model of production unit has been developed in Bandung TTC, where the TTC and a private enterprise work together to establish a joint venture for the organisation of production unit carried out by building, electronics, electrical, mechanical and automotive sections of the TTC. The management of the production unit is carried out by an executive committee consisting of TTC staff and people from the enterprise.

The objectives of the cooperation are:

· to support technical skill training and education activities for TTC students

· to create a source of income for the TTC and the enterprise

· to create job opportunity, breeding industry and business minded, apprenticeship and on-the-job training opportunities for TTC students

In this cooperation, the TTC provides:

· the workplace

· machines and other relevant facilities

· the relevant expertise of TTC staff

while the enterprise provides:

· funds

· relevant expertise

· maintenance of facilities

The first step of the cooperation is producing furniture products in the building section and making machine components in the mechanical section. The involvement of students and teachers in the production process in real experience of producing marketable products will give them valuable experience of how quality and work speed are measured for the acceptability of the work result.

Through this cooperative model, the weaknesses of marketing which pervade the production unit at schools could be solved by the availability of marketing expertise of the industry as the school partner. This is obvious, when the furniture produced by the TTC could enter the world market and becomes an export commodity.