NN46, September 2011
Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark
What are Skills? Reflections on Policy in South Africa in the Context of International Debates
By Stephanie Allais, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Email: stephanie.matseleng@gmail.com
Keywords: South Africa, skills policies, vocational education, education policy, education and the labour market, varieties of capitalism.
Summary: This paper argues that two underlying factors which have led to difficulties with skills development in South Africa are the National Qualifications Framework, which has trapped skills policies in a narrow notion of skills as tasks, and a social welfare system that ignores the reality of high unemployment, extreme job insecurity, and low wages.
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This paper reflects on South Africa’s ‘skills’ policies since the transition to democracy in 1994 in the context of two bodies of international literature. The first explores how the notion of ‘skilled’ labour is shaped by the nature of the labour market, how different qualifications are produced, understood, and valued, and how they correspond with different occupational divisions of labour. I draw on European research which distinguishes between vocational education and training systems focused on education for an occupation, and systems aimed at enabling individuals to achieve ‘employability’ through a market of qualifications. South Africa, I argue, can be located in the latter approach. Specifically, we have followed the UK model of using qualification reform to regulate the ‘market of qualifications’, through the creation of a National Qualifications Framework relying on employer specifications of competencies to ensure ‘relevance’. Underpinning this is a labour market characterized by extremely high unemployment, job insecurity, casualization, out-sourcing, and extremely low wages. These two factors have reinforced a narrow and atomized notion of skills as tasks for fragmented jobs, as contrasted with the systematic knowledge combined with operational experience and ability of technical occupations, and the defined knowledge base, controlled entry, and higher qualifications of the professions. I argue that while this type of policy seeks to create what it calls a ‘demand-led’ system, it is focused on employers’ short-term labour market needs, rather than long term educational needs of young people or long-term needs of the economy. I also argue that the ensuing qualification model has been cumbersome and difficult to use, because of the tendency of competency-based systems to lead to narrow but lengthy and overspecified qualification documentation, which has made the work of government institutions as well as providers difficult, and, ironically, has made it harder for providers to be responsive to employers’ needs.
The second body of literature that I consider is that on ‘varieties of capitalism’, which attempts to understand and compare the institutional basis of different production systems in the advanced economies. Specifically, I draw on a model which distinguishes three worlds of skill formation, each reflective of a particular underlying class coalition and political–economic institutional structure. This model suggests that social equality fosters the development of high levels of both general and specific skills, especially at the bottom end of the skill distribution, which in turn reinforces social equality. Specific and general skills at the bottom of the distribution are strongly linked to employment protection and unemployment replacement rates. General skills at this level are also strongly related to active labour market policy spending and day care spending, as well as to vocational education. I argue that despite the dominant view in the South African media that our economic woes are due to ‘skills shortage’ coupled with an inflexible labour market, the inadequacy of our social security system and the high levels of job insecurity make it almost impossible to develop robust and coherent skills development. Instead, vocational education and skills development policies are co-opted and trapped in a paradigm of ‘self-help’, ‘employability’, and labour market flexibility that works against the possibility of achieving improved levels of education and skills.
What are the implications of this for strengthening vocational education and skills development in South Africa? We are not going to have either regulated occupational labour markets or universal social welfare in the short term. Nonetheless, improved social policy, located in an expanded notion of citizenship and welfare provision, could be a starting point. Another starting point should be strengthening curricula and the knowledge base of vocational and occupational qualifications—the neglected ‘education’ side of vocational education. This should include developing a much better understanding of how to assist students to acquire this knowledge, a difficult area in the context of the weaknesses of the South African school system. These factors are not ‘nice-to-haves’, on top of a well-functioning vocational education and skills development system. They are part of what would make such a system work.
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Cite article as: Allais, S., (2011) ‘What are Skills? Reflections on Policy in South Africa in the Context of International Debates’, in NORRAG NEWS, Towards a New Global World of Skills Development? TVET's turn to Make its Mark, No.46, September 2011, pp. 29-30, available: http://www.norrag.org
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