The latest key indicators of national well-being: ‘health status; education status and labour force quality’ under the Vision 2030 Jamaica – National Development Plan’, has revealed that tertiary level enrolment for 2011 recorded a 3.1 per cent increase over the previous year.
Meanwhile,thelabour force quality quarterly survey, showed a 2 per cent improvement, while immunization coverage for children showed a marginal decline over the previous year.
This was outlined in the Planning Institute of Jamaica’s (PIOJ) recent Health Status Report.
“In Education, the gross enrolment rate of students at the tertiary level for the academic year 2010/2011 has increased to 35.9 per cent, based on preliminary figures, up by 3.1 percentage points compared to the academic year 2009/2010,” the report stated.
The PIOJ attributed the significant increase in tertiary enrolment in a single year to “an increase in the access to and number of tertiary educational institutions and programmes in Jamaica.”
With respect to the quality of the labour force, the report stated that “an average of 23.2 per cent of the total labour force having vocational or professional certification based on the quarterly labour force surveys for 2011, (achieving) an increase of 2.0 percentage points from the previous year.”
With respect to the immunization coverage for children, the report stated that for children between zero and 11 months the immunization covering tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus respectively, declined slightly to an average of 93.9 per cent in 2011, based on preliminary figures. This is down 0.8 percentage point from an average of 94.7 per cent in 2010.
The report added that the immunization coverage for children between 12 and 23 months for covering measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) also fell slightly to 86.5 per cent in 2011, down 0.6 percentage point from 87.1 per cent in 2010.