It is important at the outset of this historic summit to diagnose and contextualise the skills crisis in our country. In 1994, South Africa inherited the outcomes of a deliberate policy of under-development of our people. In fact the neglect went back 342 years from Dutch and British colonialism through to the apartheid era. The history of artisan training in South Africa is a vignette of the history of the country and especially so when viewed through African eyes.
Africans had had their own artisanal skills, passed down from generation to generation, for centuries they made pots, crafted jewellery, built homes and they forged metal to make the tools of war and farming tools. However, after the colonial wars and especially after the colonisers discovered gold (which Africans had been mining for centuries) and began industrialising the economy, the picture changed. It was not their skills that were valued, it was their manual labour and all sorts of vicious measures were undertaken to ensure that it remained cheap, our land was taken, hut and poll taxes were imposed and our movement was fiercely controlled.
From the late 19th century, colonial authorities began to create structures and laws which would ensure that Africans became a source of cheap labour, stripped of all rights. Over the course of the 20th century, and particularly after the advent of apartheid in 1948, Africans were stripped of all rights as workers. Freedom of movement was eliminated by the pass laws, Africans’ trade union rights were severely curtailed and various job reservation, education and other laws prevented blacks becoming trained as apprentices or becoming artisans. The school system and the further and higher education and training systems effectively denied blacks from entering most skilled professions, including engineering, architecture and accounting as well as any work requiring high levels of scientific and mathematical knowledge.
The result of all this was that the economic growth boom of the 1960s gave rise to serious skills shortages. Employers on the one hand enjoyed the benefits of abundant cheap, unskilled black labour while, on the other hand, they hankered for a more skilled workforce. The pendulum eventually swung in the 1970s spurred on by the labour and youth struggles as well as the economic troubles of that decade. In 1981 the Manpower Training Act was passed which finally opened up trade training to all. However, perversely, just as African youth gained access to apprenticeships, the system as a whole began to crumble first because of the withdrawal of the tax incentive system and secondly because of the commercialisation and privatisation of the parastatals that had for years led training in this area.
This led to legions of young people enrolling for courses that led nowhere, the notorious ‘private students’ who enrolled for and completed their ‘N’ courses at colleges and then found themselves on the edge of a great employment abyss because without the practical training and work experience that only companies could provide, they were not seen as being ‘employable’ and so too often could not find jobs. This has manifested the poverty cycle in communities across the country, leading to a myriad of other social problems in our society such as crime, social decay and the reliance on the state for livelihoods.
On the other end of the education spectrum, we are facing serious challenges to the sustainability of our national intellectual project to sustain research and innovation. Only 33% of academics having PhDs (this varies across faculties) are actively involved in research activities and can competently guide research students. The biggest research and development challenge lies in South Africa’s aging and shrinking population of academics that will soon retire, leaving a serious continuity gap in key research infrastructure. While we recognise apartheid’s crippling structural, racial and economic ravages, we have yet to increase the number of black and women scientists, technologists and engineers in our academic ranks.
Access to our formal education and training institutions is constrained and needs to be expanded. In particular, the enrolments at Further Education and Training (FET) colleges must be expanded substantially if we are to come anywhere close to meeting both the need for mid-level skills and the demand of youth for increased training opportunities. While we are mindful of the need to maintain and improve the quality of education and training we must also be bold in expanding enrolments and thus opportunities while not compromising quality.
South Africa now suffers from the twin scourges of high unemployment and a shortage of critical skills needed to drive economic growth and social development. The skills shortage underpins many of the challenges government faces with regard to service delivery, the expansion of decent work and social justice. There is both anecdotal and empirical evidence of skills shortages in a number of occupations and economic sectors within South Africa. It is clear that there is a tangible problem arising from the mismatch between the supply and demand for skills in the South African labour market.
Between 1994 and 2009, this problem was aggravated by non-alignment in government, with the responsibility for workplace and in-service training of workers located with the Department of Labour and the formal education system the responsibility of the Department of Education and the provincial education departments.
While there have been some advances over the past 16 years in alleviating the skills challenge, the intention of government now is that the two departments of education Basic Education and Higher Education and Training cooperate to establish and manage an education and training system that is able to deliver an educated and informed population with the knowledge and skills necessary to operate a sophisticated, modern economy.
As many of you know, my department has the responsibility for higher education, the college sector, all post-literacy adult education, and broadly workplace skills development. The latter includes the infrastructure of the Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETAs), the National Skills Authority (NSA) and the National Skills Fund (NSF). The restructuring of the education and training landscape over the past year poses challenges and opportunities that require our collective thinking and participation.
The glue which holds the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) together is the preparation of post-school youth for the labour market and to help them to further develop the skills, values and ethics needed to participate usefully in the social, political and cultural life of their communities and society as a whole.
By bringing together the ‘supply-side’ oriented post-school learning system that existed within the Department of Education and the ‘demand-side’ that was previously located in the Department of Labour we can address skill deficits and bottlenecks which contribute to the structural constraints to our growth and development path. For the first time the jurisdiction for workplace learning and college based training fall under a single umbrella. This opens up new vistas and the opportunities for the design of ‘pipelines’ from education to work, as well as the inverse, where workers from both the formal and informal economy can return to study to upgrade their knowledge and qualifications for improved income.
Since the establishment of the DHET last year, we have been constructing the architecture for post-school education and training sector and have adopted an inclusive approach to our work. This is because we do not believe that we have all the answers to the challenges we face, nor can we set about on some lone, heroic mission to tackle them. Earlier this year, we brought together our partners in the university sector for an honest engagement on the higher education environment.
Last week, we met as stakeholders in the Further Education and Training (FET) college sector to stabilise and develop the colleges as an essential part of the DHET family and as the locus of delivery of vocational and continuing education and training with strong links to industry in order to meet critical skill shortages.
We meet here today as stakeholders and partners to map the way forward and synchronise our efforts on skills development. As you would all know, I signed a performance agreement with the President in line with the outcomes approach of government. This involves a few outputs per outcome that are measurable and have specific targets.
The outcome which sets the agenda for our work is: “A skilled and capable workforce to support an inclusive growth path”. Ladies and gentlemen, and comrades, this outcome requires a major shake-up in the higher education and training system. It means we all need to do things differently and synergise our efforts particularly in the area of skills training. It is not only a matter of meeting targets and performance indicators, but one of meeting the deepest needs and desires of our people, especially rural people, the poor and the working class. To create the kind of country that our people long for and deserve, we must meet their education and training expectations because these are the basis of so much more: a more developed economy, a higher standard of living and a richer social and cultural life for all.
I have invited you here today to discuss the following issues spelt out in the performance agreement:
- establishing a credible institutional mechanism for skills planning
- increasing access to intermediate and high level learning for youth and adults who do not meet entry requirements for post-school programmes
- increasing access to occupationally-directed programmes in needed areas with special focus on artisan training
- increasing access to high level skills in target areas such as in the fields of engineering, animal and health sciences, physical and life sciences and teacher education
- research, development and innovation in human capital for a growing knowledge economy
The discussions over the next two day will inform how we achieve these targets which demands collective will and purposeful action from all stakeholders. We need to locate our discussions against the background of an urgent necessity to contribute towards a new economic growth path for our country. Our work must interface with the range of social and economic development strategies across all spheres of government including the Industrial Policy Action Plan II, the Anti-Poverty Strategy, the Rural Development Strategy and the Technology and Innovation Plan.
The over-arching framework for all our work is the Human Resource Development Strategy for South Africa which is soon to be launched by the deputy president. The HRDSA will mprove alignment and ensure that all players in human resource development from government, civil society sectors, organised business, labour, professional bodies and research communities reinforce and complement the work of others.
Our aim is to tackle the skills challenge in and through the entire post-school education and training environment from second chance learning and adult education to high level skills, research and innovation using all the institutions at our disposal including the universities, universities of technology, colleges and the SETAs. We are working to improve the interface and articulation of programmes at universities, universities of technology, colleges and SETAs. There must be improved synergy and closer working relationships amongst all these institutions.
In six few months, the National Skills Development Strategy III, the overarching strategic instrument for skills development, will be implemented to guide sector planningfor the next five years. The NSDS III proposes a new and innovative programme called PIVOT which provides for increased numbers and relevance of academic, professional and vocational learning that meets the critical needs for economic growth and social development. These programmes generally combine course work at universities, universities of technology and colleges with structured learning at work. This is achieved by means of professional placements, work-integrated learning, apprenticeships, learnerships, internships and the like.
Concurrently, the new SETA landscape will be licensed next year which will provide stability and new vigour to the education and training machinery. Recently, there have been misguided and dangerous calls from some quarters that the SETA system be scrapped altogether and that levy funds be conferred directly to FET colleges. These calls are bizarre and ill-considered because they are based on the assumption that the colleges and SETAs perform the same function.
This is not the case. While the colleges are education and training providers, the SETAs do not provide training. They have a legal duty to disburse 80% of the skills development levy funds and are constituted in as governance structures to represent a partnership between government, business and labour to direct skills training in various sectors. The SETAs also work at different levels of the training hierarchy and are intermediaries between business and training institutions using organised networks for workplace training.
We are well aware of the challenges some SETAs face in terms of performance and efficiency and are at an advanced stage of the process to deal with these problems. I have received advice from the National Skills Authority on the proposed landscape after their exhaustive consultation process. I thank the many organisations that engaged the NSA on this. The NSA is still considering the many submissions received on the proposed framework for the National Skills Development Strategy III and I expect to receive this soon.
In the next few weeks, I will finalise the redesign of the SETA landscape which is aimed at better alignment of skills development according to sectoral needs. I want to pronounce categorically that the SETA system is here to stay and will remain a central cog of our skills development machinery. We have full confidence that the new SETA landscape in conjunction with the NSDS III and we will be guided by the work of the Human Resource Development Council led by the deputy president will help us turn the corner in skills planning and development.
We are mindful of the need to produce quality skills to improve the employability of both people entering the labour market and those who are in employment and need to develop their skills further. In February, we launched the Quality Council for Trades and Occupations which is responsible for developing and quality assuring occupational qualifications.
We are also establishing the National Artisan Moderating Body which will, amongst other things, ensure the production of quality artisans and also clear obstacles around efficient and quality trade tests. Both these bodies will play an important role in developing and sustaining public confidence in the quality assurance of skills development and training. The DHET is currently taking measures to strengthen the INDLELA trade-testing centre as part of our work to ensure increased artisan output.
My department will also place at the centre of all the synergies required for an effective post-schooling system, the question of the recognition of prior learning (RPL). I will be asking the qualifications and quality councils to urgently work on a framework for RPL as soon as possible.
One of the most important issues the HRD Council seeks to direct is the improvement of South Africa’s technological and innovation capability. Both within the public and private sectors, we need to enhance our capacity to meet our developmental priorities through which to also improve our competitiveness in the global economy. We must also ensure that the public sector has the capability to meet the strategic priorities of the South African developmental state.
While government is making every effort through all the vehicles at our disposal to tackle the skills challenge, we still need greater buy-in from employers to realise our education and training goals and to advance a skills revolution in our country. Our collective efforts to educate and develop skills of current and future generations of school leavers will be hampered if they are not supported by the employers. It is essential that the business sector and professional organisations, including the public sector employers, partner us to open up workplaces for learnerships, apprenticeships and workplace experience in order to improve the employability of young people. Employers must ensure that workplaces are not just places to boost the bottom line but are also centres of training and platforms to nurture talent.
I should emphasise that when I refer to employers, I do not refer to private employers alone. The state owned enterprises, which already have a history and tradition of artisan training, have a particularly important role to play. They have already started strengthening their training capacities in the last couple of years and need to continue doing so, so that they once again become training power-houses, producing skills to serve not only their own needs but those of the economy as a whole. This may require a re-working of their remit and I will pursue this with my colleagues in government.
Municipalities and provincial governments also have an important role to play in skills development. This role is particularly important in rural areas where other employers are in short supply. As well as providing on-the-job training or work-experience for young college students, municipalities and provinces can themselves benefit from the partly skilled labour of these students.
One of the systems which I believe is worth exploring is Germany’s dual system of college and artisan training. I am of the view this is a programme we can learn a lot from as a country as diversity in post-school options must be increased and vocational colleges promoted as a viable and an attractive alternative.Linkages between formal vocational education and workplace opportunities a system which has been perfected in Germany and some other countries must be strengthened in South Africa.It is not a system that is completely alien to South Africa and is not dissimilar to the system of artisan training that existed in the past, albeit mainly for white apprentices. This is a tradition that we must adapt to use in a democratic, non-racial and non-sexist South Africa so that all our people can benefit.
This is a discussion I intend to take up with our partners in business and labour when we meet at National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) next month. A detailed plan on how to achieve my targets as set out in the agreement with the President will be presented by our Director-General later this morning.
Ladies and gentlemen,and comrades, I urge you to engage seriously in your working groups later today, bring your own unique perspectives and expertise so that we may emerge from this summit with a joint and wide-ranging plan to meet our skills development targets. I look forward and will value the contributions you make to this ongoing partnership and pledge to continue to work with all our stakeholders to advance our skills revolution.
I thank you.
Enquiries:
Ranjeni Munusamy
Tel: 012 312 5555 or 021 465 5513
Cell: 072 571 2812
E-mail: munusamy.r@dhet.gov.za
