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Media release The National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) has proved costly, complex and excessively bureaucratic. It has focused too narrowly on qualifications, apparently believing that these alone can bring about revolutionary change in education and training in South Africa. This, in turn, has a negative effect on vocational training in the further education and training system of the country. This is one of the conclusions in a chapter on South Africa in a new Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) report, Vocational Education and Training in Southern Africa, edited by Salim Akoojee, Anthony Gewer and Simon McGrath. The report emanates from a study, comparing vocational education and training (VET) in seven southern African countries, Botswana, Lesotho, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland. In producing a balance sheet of the performance of VET in South Africa after ten years of democracy, the report points out that much was achieved over the last ten years: racial discrimination in VET legislation has been removed; the 17 separate education departments and racially separate institutions have given way to one national education department and deracialised institutions; and the merging of 152 former technical colleges into 50 further education and training colleges has been a crucial element in developing a new system. On the positive side new systems has been put in place between the national and local education and training level – provincial education departments on the one hand, and Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) on the other, with the creation of the National Skills Authority (NSA) to bind all stakeholders more closely to the National Skills Development Strategy. SAQA was established to encourage better articulation between, or joining up of, education and training. The integration of education and training is also reinforced in a clear new policy vision and by the joint production by the two departments in the Human Resources Development Strategy (HRDS), the Department of Labour (DoL) and the Department of Education (DoE). The whole VET system is geared towards balancing economic and social objectives and towards combining the academic and the vocational, the theoretical and the practical. There is a clear drive also to build both the quality and quantity of VET. Enrolments and pass rates in public colleges are improving and there are signs of better relationships with employers. And there has been dramatic progress on many of the NSDS indicators. On the down side there simply have not been the promised impacts in terms of equity and progression. SAQA clearly lacks the resources to match its ambitions. "A radical review or replacement of the NQF appears to be unlikely for the foreseeable future. However, this does not diminish the clear failings of the present model and the probable limited impact of the proposed revisions", says Akoojee, a chief researcher in the HSRC's research programme on human resources development. "The NQF and SAQA are supposed to bring integration at the level of qualifications, but so far it is apparent that the different institutional logics of the Department of Education and the Department of Labour continue to threaten the integrative logic. "Indeed, the long delays in constructing a joint response between the two departments to the recommendations of the NQF review team, brought out in 2002, and the tensions that are apparent in the NQF response, a year later, highlight the level of conflict between the two over a common vision for the NQF and for education and training more generally", Akoojee says. These factors, in turn, have a severe impact on the vocational education and training in South Africa. The FET college merger process leaves unanswered a crucial set of questions about the focus of these institutions and about their coherence with other elements of the education and training landscape. Two central areas of coherence problems are that colleges, in spite of DoE policy, have struggled to access the National Skills Fund and are under-represented as providers of learnership programmes. "Perversely, this is occurring whilst SETAs are publicly bemoaning the lack of providers to deliver on such programmes. This is related to a potentially serious problem of articulation about the college-oriented version of the forthcoming FET Certificate and the awards that are already in place from SETAs. Second, there are issues of articulation with the rest of the education system", Akoojee says. Whilst the DoE seems to want its version of the FET Certificate to be more educational than the SETA offerings, there remains a challenge of making it perceived to be of similar educational quality to school-based versions. This has particular implications for the question of progression from college to higher education. "Given the likely centrality of small, medium and micro enterprise development to the future of South Africa, which heavily relies on VET, it is especially serious that policies and programmes of skills provision for enterprise development remain so weak and that coherence is particularly bad in this area", he says. But Akoojee has high hopes that many of these issues will be tackled in the final version of the second National Skills Development Strategy, the proposals for a revised NQF and the nascent plans for the FET college sector. "Senior officials in both departments are clearly aware of many of the issues raised here and of the messages sent by the new development vision. "However, the greatest problem for the new VET system is the hostile labour market and economic environment in which these reforms have taken place. Take-up of learnerships and the placement in employment of graduates of colleges or learnership programmes for the unemployed are heavily constrained by the lack of employer demand for young labour market entrants. "Progress towards a South African skills revolution is an important move towards overall development goals but is itself constrained by the weakness and unevenness of that development. Managing this paradox is perhaps the greatest challenge for the emergent system", Akoojee concludes.
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