Manpower planning and the staffing needs of schools

Abstract

The goals of education Education serves a social function when it seeks to respond to the demands of individuals or communities for an education suited to their particular needs, aspirations and cultural traditions. It serves a manpower function when it seeks to provide the economy with trained personnel, to ensure that there are sufficient engineers, nurses or teachers to meet the needs of society as a whole. Given, therefore, that education seeks to discharge both social and manpower functions, it is necessary to think of educational planning as having to reconcile these functions, and to consider to what extent manpower planning has contributed to educational planning. Ruiter' has demonstrated, with regard to the Netherlands, how educational forecasts, which determine supply, can be at loggerheads with demand studies in the field of manpower. He has suggested that the potential for conflict between the social and manpower goals of education - between the needs of individuals and groups on the one hand and the needs of the economic system on the other - is normally resolved by postulating a voluntary conformity of individuals to both social and economic needs. He has also pointed out that the manpower philosophy which leaves the burden of bringing about a correct distribution of students over the various levels of education to the students themselves (and their parents and teachers) has its complement in the philosophy of educational guidance. When guidance and information services fail to achieve a reasonable balance between student output and career opportunities then, and only then, may political intervention be called for. Within education there is a long and interesting history of attempts to arbitrate between the social or personal goals of education and its vocational goals (Mitter2). There has been the separate development of vocational education in the form of manual or technical education at the late primary or post-primary stage and as professional or technological training in monotechnic, polytechnic and university institutions at the further and higher education stages. In the training of teachers we have had the development of concurrent and consecutive modes of training. Concurrent training, which is the preferred mode of the