FACTORS INFLUENCING MARITIME EDUCATION AND TRAINING GLOBALLY
4.4 SAFETY AND SECURITY
“Participation in the course will have raised awareness of the elements of leadership and teamwork, it will be through exercising leadership, observing others, participating in and building teamwork in the working environment, learning from the more competent and experienced people on-board, that competence in learning will develop” (IMO, 2014: 24).
This promotes the idea that leadership skills are perhaps difficult to gain via short-term training programmes, according to Mori (2014). Mori (2014) pronounces that training for such skills is best undertaken from a long-term view. This would include a constant learning process through real-life on-shore or on-board working experience. Although MET institutions have established numerous models of leadership training, these current leadership models seem to have ample room for improvement. Mori (2014) also established that numerous MET experts believe that the existing leadership training approaches are insufficient for their envisioned purposes. Nonetheless, the history of safety in the maritime industry has been characterised by accidents, which are always followed regulatory responses (Schröder-Hinrichs, Baldauf, Hofmann and Kataria, 2013).
To promote maritime safety more effectively, a number of States proposed that a international body that was permanent be established. Unfortunetly it was not until the founding of the United Nations (UN) that this was realised (IMO, 2016). An international conference in Geneva in 1948, adopted a convention formally establishing IMO (previously the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization/IMCO until 1982. In 1958 the IMO Convention entered into force and in 1959 the new organisation met for the first time. To date the aim of the IMO, as summarized by Article 1(a) of the Convention, as to:
“To provide machinery for cooperation among Governments in the field of governmental regulation and practices relating to technical matters of all kinds affecting shipping engaged in international trade; to encourage and facilitate the general adoption of the highest practicable standards in matters concerning maritime safety, efficiency of navigation and prevention and control of marine pollution from ships” (IMO, 2016).
The adopt a new version of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) was the first task of the IMO. Of all the treaties, this was the most important addressing maritime safety and was achieved in 1960. The IMO, during which the system of measuring the tonnage of ships was being revised, then focused its attention to matters such as the facilitation of international maritime traffic, the carriage of dangerous goods and load lines. However, while safety was and remains the organisations key responsibility, new problems of pollution and piracy, inter alia, started to emerge. What was of particular and great concern was the growth in the amount of oil being transported by sea and in the size of tankers transporting it.
In 1967, the Torrey Canyon disaster of in which 120,000 tonnes of oil was spilled, revealed the scale of the problem. As a specialised agency of the United Nations, IMO is the global standard- setting authority for the safety, security, and environmental performance of international shipping.
Its main role is to create a regulatory framework for the shipping industry that is fair and effective, universally adopted, and universally implemented.
In 1978, the International Convention on Standards of Training, Certification and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW) was signed in London, UK, and came into effect in 1984. In 1995, the STCW was then amended, and again in the year 2010. The STCW sets qualification standards for
requirements for seafarers at an international level. This gave birth to the current internationalization of MET.
Prior to the STCW 1978, standards of training and certification were established by individual governments, and in most cases without reference to practices in other countries, despite the international nature of shipping. The STCW has greatly improved standards for seafarers and, for the first time, gave the IMO, self powers to be a ‘watchdog’ that checks government action, were the it requires parties/its members to submit information detailing their compliance with the Convention. A major revision of the STCW Convention and Code in 2010 was completed with the adoption of the ‘Manila amendments to the STCW Convention and Code’. Ziarati, Demire and Albayrak (2010), point out that:
“The provisions concerning the need for governments to submit quality standard reports to the IMO, concerning their national training and certification systems, were only required to be met as recently as 2000” (Ziarati, Demire and Albayrak, 2010:8).
The 2000s brought an era of maritime security, with an entry coming into force in July 2004. This was a new and comprehensive security system for international shipping, including the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code, made mandatory under amendments to SOLAS adopted in 2002. In 2005, the IMO adopted amendments to the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts (SUA) Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation, 1988, and its related Protocol (the 2005 SUA Protocols). The Protocol has, among other things, introduced, “the right of a State Party to board a ship flying the flag of another State Party, when the requesting party has reasonable grounds to suspect that ship, or a person on board the ship is, has been, or is about to be involved in, the commission of an offence under the Convention” (IMO, 2016). As IMO instruments have entered into force and been implemented, developments in technology and/or lessons learned from accidents have led to changes and amendments being adopted (IMO, 2016).
In 2004, a study commissioned by the IMO mainly concentrating on the causes of accidents without a doubt indicated that standards had not been applied correctly. When the human factor
the education and training in maritime programmes and courses received by the seafarers involved in accidents (Brady, 2008; Ziarati and Ziarati, 2010). The quality of MET is pivotal in the growth, safety, and security of the global maritime industry. Despite factors such as technological advances in the industry and MET institutional resources, MET has tended to compromise quality, which leads to accidents and other human error in the maritime industry. The maritime industry has also considered the Human Factor (HF), “as a main contributing factor to accidents, in common with other industrial sectors” (Schröder-Hinrichs et al., 2013:224). However, Berg (2013:344) affirms that, “regulations and systems have not achieved the desired effects in averting maritime accidents which are a result of human errors and account for 80 percent of those occurring worldwide.”
Thus, according to (Gamil, 2008:2), “the maritime industry needs to upgrade their human resources to properly implement international legislation and keep pace with advanced technologies on board vessels as well as in their design and operation.” According to Baylon and Santos (2011:34), “it is pivotal that seafarers be well-educated and trained, manage risks, be able to follow orders, solve problems, and must be emotionally happy and psychologically stable to ensure secure, safe, clean and efficient operations for safety of life at sea”. The role of theMET is central to boosting sea safety (Davy and Noh, 2011) and security.