It’s time to get vocational education less wrong in the battle against youth unemployment (Part Two)

More technical training for apprenticeships in trades like carpentry would be advantageous. (Photo: Brent Lewin / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

By Stephanie Allais

11 Jul 2024

TVET colleges must be strengthened so they can provide niche, high-quality training to counter the reality of their students’ weak, prior educational achievements. This is expensive, but worth it if it produces the skilled artisans the economy needs.

Part two of a three-part series. Read Part 1 here.

Youth unemployment is one of our country’s most serious crises. Many believe that job training, known internationally as vocational education, is the answer.

In countries like Germany, Austria and Switzerland, a well-established vocational training system funnels a majority of 15- to 20-year-olds into skilled work. But as in many other countries, our system has always been weak.

As a result, 30 years have been spent continuously reforming vocational colleges. They have been renamed, restructured, given new governance models and shaped and reshaped by shifting programme types, curricula, qualification policies and quality assurance arrangements. Further changes are currently underway.

Still, pockets of excellence exist in some technical and vocational education and training (TVET) colleges, ensuring dynamic relationships with employers and good employment outcomes for individuals.

But the people working in these colleges and getting it right do so in the face of almost inhuman odds. It is time to support them and their colleagues in other TVETs, rather than overwhelm them with constant change.

Three key problem areas

First, colleges are supposed to ensure a regular flow of artisans to an economy short of skilled, qualified staff. At the same time, they are expected to absorb masses of young people who have fared poorly in formal education, giving them skills for work which, in reality, is not available. The same institutions cannot play both of these roles effectively.

Vocational education is not a silver bullet for youth unemployment or economic development. Almost no countries outside Europe have strong mass vocational education systems. It is difficult to get vocational education right.

The location of TVET colleges in the broader skill formation system puts them in an almost impossible position between a generally weak school system, a relatively strong university system, and a low-growth economy with chronically high unemployment.

The pull of universities is strong because a degree vastly increases employment prospects. So those who can, head to university.

University student numbers have been deliberately and substantially increased over the past 30 years. This leaves TVET colleges to take students with generally weak school results.

This structural problem can’t be quickly or easily solved. But we need to face the fact that it is South Africa’s reality.

Specialised training needed

TVET colleges must be strengthened so they can provide niche, high-quality training to counter the reality of their students’ weak prior educational achievements. This is expensive, but worth it if it produces the skilled artisans the economy needs.

Second, the colleges have had to deal with a shifting set of qualifications and quality assurance arrangements, associated with changing curriculum and assessment models, intake periods and funding mechanisms.

TVET colleges must be strengthened so they can provide niche, high quality training to counter the reality of their students’ weak prior educational achievements. (Photo: iStock)

The “N” qualifications are, today, trimester offerings emerging from the old apprenticeship system. In the past, students would attend technical college for three months to learn theory followed by nine months in the workplace. By design, these three-month courses have no practical component because students do the practical in the workplace. The old system included a nationally prescribed curriculum and examinations.

A carpenter turns a table leg on a wood lathe inside a furniture workshop More technical training for apprenticeships in trades like carpentry would be advantageous. (Photo: Brent Lewin / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The system’s decline dates back to the late apartheid era. When the old apprenticeship system began to be discarded in the 1980s, courses became full-time. By 1994, the apprenticeship system was tiny, and work placements were rare. Programmes offered by colleges became separated from the remains of the apprenticeship system.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the labour minister announced the replacement of apprenticeships with a new system of learnerships, against outcomes-based national qualifications registered on a national framework.

Public and private institutions offering these qualifications would have to be accredited by the relevant Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas), reporting at the time to the minister of labour.

The NCV system

A new qualification, the National Certificate Vocational (NCV) was developed by the Department of Education as an alternative to matric. However, employers did not want to let go of the apprenticeship system for a new approach they didn’t know or trust. So the “N” trimester qualifications and the apprenticeship system were not phased out.

Employers viewed the NCV as both too general to meet their specific needs, and not general enough to allow for foundational learning skills to be developed. Colleges were poorly prepared to teach the NCV; students were poorly prepared to enrol for it, and throughput rates were disastrous.

The framework changed in 2009, creating a new body, the Quality Council for Trades and Occupations (QCTO). It developed new occupational qualifications, and the quality assurance arrangements changed again. So colleges had to be accredited by the QCTO while in many cases still working through the Setas.

Confused? Imagine working in a college at the receiving end of constant criticism for poor throughput and failing to meet the needs of the economy.

At the same time, the qualifications and quality assurance arrangements led to the third problem area – institutional form and funding mechanisms.

A question of funding

Two completely different sets of institutional logic operate in the same institutions simultaneously: a bureaucratic delivery model and an aspirational entrepreneurial one. They exist side by side because of how funding works. Colleges manage this by creating separate units, centres or components that operate according to the relevant logic of each model.

The N and NCV qualifications are funded through teacher posts, and managed and examined by the Department of Higher Education and Training against learner enrolment targets it sets. The occupational qualifications require colleges to be accredited and apply for funding through the skills levy.

The latter model assumes private and public education and training providers are nimble institutions, able to adopt programme offerings based on annual funding windows. This is difficult for any educational institution because it does not allow forward planning and hiring staff with appropriate expertise in long-term appointments.

Any substantive educational programme takes time to design, offer and lead students to a qualification. Making programmes dependent on short-term funding is particularly difficult for weak institutions, but even when they are strong, they struggle. In the training context, labour market responsiveness should be seen in the medium and not the short term.

The challenge is that colleges serving mostly poor students with weak educational achievement carry an enormous burden of expectations within the context of constant policy reform and muddled governance and funding.

Lecturers are expected to be three things at the same time: entrepreneurially minded sellers of qualifications; sophisticated navigators of a highly complex accreditation, qualifications and quality-assurance system; and teachers of a prescribed curriculum leading to a national exam through a state-funded system managed by a national government department.

Winds of change

And as if this was not enough, change is in the air again. The main TVET offering, N qualifications, is being phased out. Colleges have been instructed that 2024 is the last year in which they can enrol students against lower-level N qualifications.

Not officially discussed are the substantial differences in funding and regulatory models, and how they will be managed. The DHET has signalled that colleges will continue to receive funding at current levels at least during the phasing in of the new model, but the future is less clear.

The system requires TVET colleges to gain accreditation against registered occupational qualifications in areas identified as occupations in high demand. Funding will allow them to offer specific programmes in competition with each other and private providers.

This is a huge change, and it is unclear if many colleges can cope with it.

Colleges can’t solve youth unemployment. But they can play an important role in the economy and their communities, with a simplified vision, simpler funding, and a national government that supports institution-building.

Strong institutions can be responsive. The DHET should support and build these institutions driven by a stable, realistic and simpler vision of what they can and should achieve. DM

Stephanie Allais is a Professor of Education at the Centre for Researching Education and Labour, at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she holds a South African National Research Chair in Skills Development.

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