RECOGNITION OF PRIOR LEARNING
Recognition of prior learning (RPL), which could be key to alleviating South Africa’s critical skills shortage and reducing the high number of unemployed young South Africans, is not being used effectively.
Speaking at the Future of the Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) Landscape conference, held in Johannesburg in September 2010, Department of Higher Education and Training deputy director-general Adrienne Bird said that South Africa’s current sector education and training authority (SETA) landscape was bleak.
Further, more than 28-million of South Africa’s youths were unemployed and not in any form of education or training programme, and, of these, two-million were without a matric certificate.
She said that future plans must include assisting young people to achieve skills.
Prior Learning Centre academic director Dr Karen Dellar said that the implementation of initiatives to recognize people’s previous experience and skills could be a tool for social transformation.
“RPL has the potential to assist those individuals trapped in entry-level positions because they don’t have the necessary qualifications to move up in an organization,” she explained. “It has the potential to change our workplace profile from unskilled to skilled and contribute to the upliftment of South Africa’s youth.”
She said it was the responsibility of the SETAs to do this and they should be playing a bigger role.
Dellar said that, under the SETAs in South Africa, there was little actively with regard to RPL.
The volume of people going through the RPL process and the number of RPL projects held by the SETA sectors had fallen significantly over the past few years.
Dellar recently conducted a South African Qualifications Authority- initiated project, where the uptake of RPL in the various SETA sectors was researched.
The research was aimed at investigating how RPL was viewed and how much RPL was being undertaken by South Africa’s SETAs.
Only 14 of the country’s 23 SETAs agreed to be interviewed. The SETAs that were actively involved in RPL before 2007 included the bank SETA, the construction SETA, the clothing and textile SETA, the food and beverage SETA, the insurance SETA, the manufacturing, engineering and related services SETA and the tourism and hospitality SETA.
Today, only the services SETA is fully involved in RPL, with three others only taking part as far as the section 28 trade test goes.
Somewhat encouraging was the desk-top research finding that all 23 SETAs have some sort of RPL strategy.
However, 21% of them had never updated their strategy, 28% were unsure if their strategy was on their website and 40% could not explain the contents of their strategy, which included the model of RPL strategy, the process of RPL within their sector or how funding was accessed for the process.
Of the 14 SETAs that were contacted, most gave reasons for not implementing RPL and one of the major reasons was that the practice did not fit in with that sector’s unique conditions.
Six of the 14 SETAs were reconsidering the implementation of RPL, but using a different model to the one presented in the past.
One of the SETAs felt that RPL was better suited to lower-level qualifications.
“RPL, as an assessment methodology, drives the immediate and outlying objectives derived from learnerships, apprenticeships and skills programmes. “The RPL methodology built into that feeds to certification and introduction into the formal market,” said higher education institute Production Management Institution (PMI) head of strategic projects John Botha.
He also said that the National Skills Development Strategy document states that all people who seek to enroll in learn- ing programmes but do not have the standard entry qualifications, need to be given the opportunity to have the skills they gained through practical work experience measured against those needed to attain a higher position.
The document also says that all principal sectoral and national programmes need to include RPL access routes by 2016.
Edited by: Martin Zhuwakinyu