Research

The Researching Education and the Labour Market programme currently has four main areas of research:

1. Education and the economy
2. Knowledge, curriculum, and pedagogy of education for the workplace
3. Barriers to accessing post-school education
4. Strengthening post-school institutions

1. Education and the economy

This strand of our research aims to improve our understandings of relationships between education systems and economies, and the need for qualified people in South Africa and the ability of our education system to meet the needs.

One of our large projects in this area is on understanding the skills needs of the economy. Credible information for skills planning is an ongoing problem in South Africa (like many countries around the world). The REAL programme aims to support strategic thinking and policymaking at the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and to build the Department’s capacity as well as that of the Sectoral Education and Training Authorities (SETAs) to anticipate trends in the demand for and supply of skills from the education and training sector. We have a major project designed around econometric modeling. Working with project partners (Applied Development Research Solutions (ADRS), the Human Science Research Council (HSRC), and the Corporate Strategy and Industrial Development (CSID) research programme at Wits), it will build on existing macro-economic modeling of the South African economy, and add modules around various aspects of the education and training system. The particular strength of this project is bringing together critical educational researchers with progressive economists.

2. Knowledge, curriculum, and pedagogy of education for the workplace

The vast majority of post-school education is, in different ways and in to different degrees, vocational and professional in orientation. Vocational programmes are usually developed without a clear analysis of the economy and without an analysis of existing vocational provision, and why it has not worked. The problems with vocational education are complex. One is lack of jobs—an economic, not educational problem. Further, the emerging job market has an ‘hour glass’ shape, with increasing employment for both highly skilled (intellectual) work, and unskilled work which requires little training, but less for the middle levels of skills. The second is that vocational education is usually developed independently from professional education, despite the fact that it is almost always the case that professionals have an interest in the knowledge and skills of people who work for them—technicians and artisans. This is one reason for its weak knowledge base.

We have various projects focused in this area.

One involves a conceptualisation of vocational and professional curricula located in political economy. This is a long term research project, which will interrogate conceptualizations of vocational and professional knowledge and curricula, linked to a critical engagement with research into the labour process and changes in the nature of work, and consideration of the interface between education, knowledge, and the economy, and the implications for knowledge and skills.

Another project is investigating knowledge, curriculum, and assessment practices in four professions/occupations: health (nursing), engineering, agriculture, and teaching. This will include an analysis of the occupational/ professional areas in question. The bodies of knowledge which are the basis of these areas of work will be mapped, working with subject experts. Current qualification and associated curricula will be interrogated, in relation to career trajectories. The research will then examine the workplace or internship component of qualifications in three targeted areas, including the assessment thereof, including an analysis of how the final judgements are made, what criteria are invoked, and what is valued by assessors.

We also intend to analyze current curriculum and qualification policy for the FET colleges, with a focus on a review of the NCV curricula, to support the DHET NCV review. We will consider the strengths and weaknesses of the current NCV in the context of our broader conceptualization of vocational and professional knoweldge, but also in the context of our broader study of qualification and quality assurance problems.

Finally, we are analyzing educator development for FET colleges. The quality of teaching is perhaps the most important factor that impacts on quality of outcomes across all education sectors. However, there is very little known about the area of vocational pedagogy. The initial and continuing professional development of FET college lecturers represents a particular challenge to the system. Teacher development specifically related to the vocational curriculum, which is conceptualized as a ‘knowledge-practice’ curriculum, is a new area for universities. Vocational knowledge and vocational pedagogy are specialised areas in which a specialised body of literature is emerging. This research will include conceptual and literature-based research into vocational pedagogy, as well as bringing together existing data on college offerings, lecturer qualifications, teacher capacity, prioritized teaching areas, and an analysis of current offerings for FET college lecturers, to develop focused proposals for capacity-building and long term support. It will also involve the compilation of resources for training FET lecturers.

3. Barriers to accessing post-school education

This strand of our research aims to improve our understanding of youth in post-apartheid South Africa, with special emphasis on out-of-education, out-of-work young people aged 15–35 years. Current work includes literature review and documentary analysis of all available project reports, tracer studies, evaluations, and available information, focused interviews with key informants, and a large scale survey. An additional component of this project will be an overview and analysis of capacity building interventions, short courses, and youth-to-jobs programmes.

We are also investigating barriers to workplacements and apprentices, and a geographic mapping of education and jobs in South Africa.

4. Strengthening post-school institutions

We are currently looking at both providing institutions, and regulatory institutions. The former starts from the premise that increasing the capacity and diversity of our education institutions must be the most important task for post-school education. A key focus of the REAL programme is therefore on how colleges can be strengthened as institutions, and what the optimal size and shape of the college sector should look like, in relation to other post-school provision. This will be draw on international studies as well as careful consideration of national needs, and the current capacity of other post-school provision. A key focus of this work will be about understanding the best and most strategic ways that universities can support colleges.

The second project will involve a review of qualification, quality assurance, and assessment institutions, configurations, and modalities. There are clearly many problems with the NQF as the overarching regulatory framework, as well as with the demarcation and modalities of the current quality assurance institutinos. The existence of the Department of Higher Education and Training enables a more rational division of the system. Before a new quality assurance becomes a powerful stakeholder in its own right, with vested interests to maintain itself, a window of opportunity presents itself for careful policy scrutiny and consideration of how quality assurance institutions should be configured, and how they should relate to assessment systems.