/ 3 September 2010

Mistakes we cannot make again

The creation of the department of higher education and training (DHET) provides a unique opportunity to address the skills challenges in South Africa. By bringing together the “supply side”-oriented post-school learning system that existed within the former department of education and the “demand side” that was previously located in the department of labour, we can address the skills deficits and bottlenecks that contribute to the structural constraints on our growth and development path.

The priorities for action are multiple and intersecting. The DHET has a statutory responsibility to research and analyse the labour market to determine skills development needs for each sector of the economy and to make this information widely available.

These skills requirement projections are needed to support key development strategies such as industrial policy (in particular the Industrial Policy Action Plan II), rural development and provincial growth and development strategies. The projections must steer the expansion of the institutions that address these requirements — our higher education institutions, colleges and public adult learning centres especially.

It is imperative that we establish a credible institutional mechanism for skills planning. No existing mechanisms provide credible information on and analyses of current and projected supply of and demand for skills. This is an obstacle to the supply of relevant skills for growing the economy.

Strategic intelligence capability
The DHET is establishing a strategic intelligence capability, in partnership with the department of science and technology and the Human Sciences Research Council, to undertake analyses, surveys, investigations, studies and research into the supply of and demand for skills. This will strengthen planning for skills across the various sectors of our economy, with their distinctive skills challenges.

These plans must be credible to each sector and be developed with the full participation of social partners. The sectoral plans that result from rigorous economic and labour market analyses must steer the utilisation of the skills levies in a way that meets development goals efficiently and effectively.

Improved planning must be accompanied by responsive institutional mechanisms that provide the skills for an inclusive growth path and address the pressing aspirations for access to education and training opportunities. Our post-school institutions need to be more efficient and quality must improve. Current participation rates are inadequate to sustain a knowledge economy in a global environment. A robust national debate, including engagement with the National Planning Commission, is needed to determine goals for post-school participation rates for 2030 with firm commitments to annual incremental targets to grow and strengthen the system to achieve these.

An appropriate differentiation of this post-school system is critical. The DHET’s higher education summit in April this year agreed that there is a need to develop a framework for a continuum of institutions that are differentiated in relation to their strengths and purposes and linked to regional and local economic networks; and that facilitate portability of students, academics and know-ledge across the system.

The need for differentiation is a central current debate across the post-school learning system and differentiation in the further education and training (FET) college sector will be a key issue at the FET summit starting on September 3. A differentiated post-school education and training system will have to resolve the question of the appropriate shape of the system, including what should be the relative sizes of the college sector and university sub-systems.

But universities and colleges — with their responsibilities broadly understood as meeting the need for high-level and intermediate-level skills (including artisan production) respectively — cannot meet all the aspirations of and needs for broader access to skills training. Creative solutions are needed to expand access and to develop institutional forms (or expanded models of differentiation) that can “raise the base” of educational levels and meet demands for access to education and training for economic inclusion and improving livelihoods.

Enormous challenge
The dimensions of this challenge are enormous. Of the 2,8-million South Africans between the ages of 18 and 24 who were (in 2007) not in employment, education or training, two million (71%) had not achieved grade 12. Of these 0,5-million (18%) had not progressed beyond primary school. Many of these are among our most talented and resilient young people, who continue to strive for opportunities to improve their skills base. Responding to this must surely be a national imperative.

The FET summit and the skills summit on September 9 and 10 are crucial. Both are underpinned by our belief that we cannot respond to these challenges outside of meaningful partnership with social partners and the leadership of our post-school education and training institutions.

We know that effective policy solutions must be arrived at through open processes in which all major stakeholders and interest groups have had the opportunity to participate. If the strategies and solutions we wish to adopt are to succeed, both those who are expected to benefit from, and those who are expected to implement, the strategies must be persuaded that these are right, necessary and capable of being implemented.

Extensive work has already been undertaken under the leadership of the steering committee for the FET summit. This leadership includes all major stakeholders in the public college sector and difficult questions have been engaged rigorously and robustly in thorough, evidence-based preparatory processes. The steering committee has not shied away from the many difficulties in the FET college subsystem in recent years that have stemmed from a complex and incomplete transition, with multiple and overlapping changes of a profound nature, for which many were ill equipped.

These difficulties have affected the colleges as institutions in different degrees. While there have been many examples of excellent and innovative practice in difficult conditions, the challenges are such that they can be addressed only by close collaboration among all key stakeholders. The immediate goal is to stabilise the situation in the college subsystem for 2011 and to provide a platform for the development of a vibrant and productive post-school education and training system in the medium and long term.

Change management
The steering committee will recommend to the FET summit that a deep process of change management and organisational development should be implemented over several years to support the implementation of the decisions that the minister will make after receiving the recommendations of the summit. The work of the task teams supporting the steering committee has shown that previous change initiatives have too often been hastily introduced, superficially explained and communicated, imposed on the system with limited understanding of the consequences at college level and without the necessary resources and support. We cannot make this mistake again.

Next week’s skills summit will be convened by the minister of higher education and training to bring the wisdom and experience of a wide range of stakeholders to consider how South Africa might develop a skilled and capable workforce to support an inclusive growth path. This goal cannot be achieved without meaningful partnerships. We intend to emerge from the summit with a shared commitment to this broad goal, followed by bilateral agreements about roles and responsibilities in the various activities that will make our shared goal a reality.

Professor Mary Metcalfe is director general of higher education and training