The national goal of lifelong learning could be more deeply internalised in South Africa, but strong initiatives to enable access to, and progress within, education, training, development and work are under way.
The traditional (that is, formal) pathways into and within these sectors do not always cater adequately for those previously hampered by apartheid and by social or gender inequalities.
Especially for these groups, Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) and Credit Accumulation and Transfer (CAT) are key means to enable access to and success with institutions of learning, as well as redress and progression within and across learning and work pathways.
One of the responsibilities of the South African Qualifications Authority (Saqa) is to develop, in consultation with the country’s three quality councils, national policy and criteria for both RPL and CAT.
We already have some excellent instances of RPL. A recent 22-country study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development describes South Africa as having a “set of consistent practices” similar to four developed (First World) countries, outranked only by four other developed countries with “quasi-systems”. No countries have fully fledged RPL systems yet.
Saqa’s initiatives for a national RPL strategy are, like all its work, based on peer-reviewed research. The national RPL strategy has three facets:
First, there is long-term research, conducted in partnership with the University of the Western Cape (UWC), which is one of the first comparative investigations of RPL practices internationally.
Second, the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and Career Advice Helpline — part of the national Career Advice Services at Saqa — deal with telephonic and email queries and assist the public with walk-in requests. Since it began in October last year the helpline has addressed more than 5 000 queries, more than 70% of which related to access to and progression in education, training, development and work.
Third, an RPL task team will hold a workshop this month in the run-up to the national RPL conference in February next year.
Saqa’s research involves partnerships with major universities and research institutions, including the UWC, the universities of KwaZulu-Natal, Rhodes and the Witwatersrand and JET Education Services.
The idea is that this research should inform policy and create long-term communities of practice, with a view to building collaborative research capacity in the system.
The Saqa-UWC partnership project notes that the original thinking on RPL in South Africa drew inspiration from the experiences of specialists and other practitioners locally and from around the world.
But implementation of RPL has proved a lot more costly and complex than was expected. In addition, its value in validating claims of equivalence across different knowledge domains has come under critical review.
Much prior RPL research was done on separate tracks, as it were, most of it at universities. Much less research has focused on trades and occupations, and even less within trade unions and community-based organisations.
The Saqa-UWC research explores practices within and across the boundaries of these sectors. In this work RPL is seen as a specialised teaching and learning process. The project involves researchers at five different sites of RPL practice, including two universities, a workers’ college, an industrial resource group and a private RPL provider.
The focuses at each site include complex mediations of knowledge, learning and assessment inherent in the design and implementation of RPL practices in different contexts. The study also considers the institutional conditions under which some practices have been able to go to scale and others have not.
Dr Heidi Bolton is the director of research at the South African Qualifications Authority. For more information on Saqa research, go to www.saqa.org.za. The NQF and Career Advice Helpline can be reached on 0860 111 673
What is RPL?
Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) involves the acknowledgement in many forms of non-formal and informal learning that learners of all ages may have acquired in the course of their working lives or by participation in community activities outside formal places of learning.
RPL has differing purposes and a few are given here. First, workers might have acquired skills in the workplace but have few or no formal qualifications and so are barred from some career pathways. In some cases it is possible for individuals to go through a process of assessment and preparation for testing, at the end of which their experience is recognised with an appropriate certificate.
A second example — some learners seek access to college, undergraduate or postgraduate study but have not met all the entrance criteria of the institution of learning they wish to enter. In some of these cases learners may again go through a process of preparation (sometimes referred to as “portfolio development”) for an assessment of their readiness to enrol for these courses.
Third, there are those already doing jobs and holding positions for which they have qualifications other than those currently recognised for that work. To comply with new national and internationally comparable laws and criteria, these individuals may need to acquire new legal certification. There are RPL preparation and assessment processes for this certification.
There are other examples. Importantly, RPL is not simply an assessment process — it is a series of activities involving teaching, learning and work, leading to the creation of suitable portfolios of the required kind.