The purpose of this policy
| 1) | This policy governs all funding and expenditure by the Department of Education (DoE) and the Provincial Departments of Education (PEDs) of programmes listed in the register of nationally approved programme offered by public Further Education and Training colleges. Furthermore, this policy establishes certain approaches and procedures that the DoE, the PEDs and public colleges should follow to improve alignment between different streams of public and private funding in the area of technical and vocational further education and training. |
| 2) | This policy emanates from section 23 of the Further Education and Training Act, 2006 (Act No. 16 of2006), which requires the Minister of Education to determine norms and standards for the funding of public further education and training colleges. |
| 3) | This policy is intended to advance a number of the goals of government relating to people's education rights, skills development, curriculum transformation, job creation, poverty alleviation, economic growth, regional cooperation and the building of a free, democratic and equitable South Africa. Some of the key government policy documents that inform this policy are the following: Education White Paper 4: A Programme for the Transformation ofFurther Education and Training (1998); A New Institutional Landscape/or Public Further Education and Training Colleges (2001); Human Resource Development Strategy for South Africa (2001): National skills development strategy (2005); the National Certificate (Vocational): A Qualification on Levels 2,3 and 4 o/the NQF (2006). |
| 4) | This policy further represents a major consolidation and refining of Government's position on the public funding of programmes offered at FET College. However, there are aspects of this policy that must inevitably change and be further refined as the education and training sector in the country evolves and develops. This policy must thus be read as an important milestone in a process of ongoing debate and policy refinement with respect to the public funding of programmes offered at FET College. |
People's education rights
| 5) | This funding policy is an important tool whereby Government supports and promotes the education rights of South Africa's people. The policy is explicitly designed to tackle the apartheid legacy of unequal access to technical and vocational further education and training, and inequalities in terms of the quality of the education service. |
| 6) | The Bill of Rights confers on all people in the country the right to further education. The Bill specifies that the state must make further education progressively available and accessible, through reasonable means. |
| 7) | The public funding of FET Colleges serves to promote the fulfilment of people's constitutional rights to further education. Moreover, this aspect of public funding assists people to realise their full potential in terms of their lifelong learning and their career paths, in particular where history and social inequities have put people at a disadvantage. |
Development of the country and the region
| 8) | Technical and vocational further education and training in South Africa, and policies and strategies for the public funding of this service at FET College must be carefully considered so that the economic and development challenges of the country can be tackled with maximum effectiveness. Three inter-linked and over-arching challenges stand out: |
| a) | The country has a legacy of high unemployment that has proved difficult to address through any simple policy solutions. Labour absorption in the formal eeonomy has been low, resulting in sustained high unemployment and forced participation, sometimes on a purely survivalist basis, in the informal economy. Government's strategy is to sustain a range of policies and programmes on both the supply and the demand sides of the labour market to reduce unemployment and promote a movement from the 'second economy' into the 'first economy'. Education and training on its own cannot solve the problem, though it is an important ingredient in the short-term solutions as well as the long-tenn strategies. The challenge in technical and vocational FET at FET Colleges is both a quantitative one and a qualitative one more education and training must occur in skills areas that are of greater relevance for the labour market. There is an under-supply of skills to the economy across the board, at the high, intermediate and low skills levels. Skills are needed both to facilitate employment with established employers, and to assist entrepreneurial self-employment. Specific vocational skills must be underpinned by a solid base of general literacy and numeracy skills. The importance of strengthening these general education foundations as an economic imperative should not be overlooked. |
| b) | Nation-building requires a focus on specific educational activities. In particular, as part of their life skills training students need to learn what rights and duties apply to employers and employees in the workplace, how to interact with others in a diverse multi-lingual environment, and how to deal with health challenges such as HIV and AIDS. Education should improve the range of life choices citizens enjoy this has been shown to be good not just for individuals but for the society and economy as a whole. Nation-building requires a reduction in the extreme income inequalities prevailing in South Africa, to a large degree caused by educational inequalities which lead to exceptionally high incomes for a few, and extremely low incomes for a great number of unemployed people. Technical and vocational further education and training has an important role to play here. |
| c) | Globalisation brings with it increasing pressure for local producers to be globally competitive, and to remain abreast of new technologies and production processes. The shift in demand has been from unskilled to skilled labour. Moreover, there is increasingly a demand for people who are capable of adapting easily to new technologies and new responsibilities in the workplace. This implies the need for a reserve of 'redundant' human capacity that may not be required immediately, but is necessary for future adaptation and expansion. Traditional training approaches that focus narrowly on one form of production are of limited value in this context, and the challenge for technical and vocational further education and training is to provide students with a solid base in particular skills, whilst giving them the skill of responding to new production modes. The challenge of production innovation applies not only to the formal economy, but also to the infomlal economy, which presents important opportunities for short-term income and job generation as part of the fonnalisation process. |
Whilst the skills development pressures brought about by globalisation are important, they should not be exaggerated. Training policies need to take cognisance of the fact that there are parts of the economy which are less 'globalised' and that may have more localised and conventional training needs.
| 9) | Technical and vocational further education and training has a role to play in the development of the Southern African and African regions. The sector in South Africa should contribute to regional development through inter-institutional linkages, the offering of programmes to students from other countries, and through the sharing of governance and policy experience. |
Trends in technical and vocational further education and training
| 10) | Government's funding priorities are informed by what best practice around the world and research by bodies such as the ILO and UNESCO tell us about the delivery of technical and vocational further education and training. The following findings stand out: |
| a) | To become more responsive, public institutions must themselves engage with stakeholders in the local economy, collecting, analysing and disseminating labour market data, entering into training agreements with stakeholders, for instance learnership agreements, fomenting entrepreneurship and assisting entrepreneurs to access financial credit. Whilst research activities at the college level should be regarded as important, this should not detract from the importance of developing tools and training programmes at the national and provincial levels to facilitate the college-level work, or from the importance of national and provincial research work as described in paragraph 20. |
| b) | Making public institutions responsive is not just a matter of diversifYing the range of services offered. The quality of teaching across the board, in practical and theoretical fields, needs to improve. Incentives should be in place to underpin this. |
| c) | The relative sizes of budgets destined for FET Colleges, general FET (Grades 10 -12) and Higher Education needs closer scrutiny. The various budget options need to be weighed up carefully, and, where necessary, budgetary shifts should be phased in. Alignment between public funding and private funding in the interests of equity and redress is important. |
| d) | Diversification in the range of services offered must go hand in hand with the development of clearer national curriculum frameworks, which at a macro level can serve as a basis for planning, costing and budgeting. Portability of credits is important. |
| e) | Technical and vocational further education and training tends to be more costly to deliver than general FET in schools. However, this should not detract from the possibility of more efficient service delivery in certain programmes. |
| f) | Good governance of the sector is best served by a mix of bottom-up and top-down processes. It is important for government to establish and maintain the national curriculum framework, a set of public funding priorities, financial and other accounting rules that accommodate the multitude of services required, and regulations governing the involvement of public institutions in partnerships, especially where these partnerships involve income generation. Unnecessary complexity in these rules and frameworks should be avoided. Institutions need to feed upwards their best practices so that these can be assessed and possibly taken to scale. Good governance also involves ongoing formal and informal interaction with employer and employee organisations, from the national level down to the level of institutions. |
Specific challenges in the South African technical. and vocational further education and training sector
| 11) | This funding policy will be used to address the following challenges that still persist in the FET College system: |
| a) | The net participation rate in the FET College sector is estimated at 2.7%. The introduction of this funding policy aims to reverse this scenario by ensuring that FET Colleges are accessible to economieally active youth and adults outside of the school system, who wish to improve their skills, gain access to better jobs or to progress to higher education. |
| b) | The low participation in the FET College sector manifests itself in an unhealthy "hourglass" shaped education system in which the school subsystem accounts for about more than 12 million pupils, the public FET Colleges account for about 400000 students and the higher education system accounts for just under 800 000 students. This policy aims to reverse this anomaly so that a pyramid shaped education system is gradually established in which the FET College sector serves more students. |
| c) | Quality problems linked to the history of under-funding of colleges are a serious threat to the education and training offered by FET Colleges. In the past, this has impacted negatively on the ability of graduates to find employment. To solve this problem, the programmes of NA TED Report 191 have been replaced by the NC(V) policy, which is designed to ensure that FET Colleges offer high quality priory skills programmes that are relevant and responsive to the needs of a growing economy. This funding policy will help ensure that more youth are enrolled in high priority skills programmes. |
| d) | Effective educators at the FET Colleges are key to bringing about the transfonnation of these institutions. The development of the educator corps to deal with new challenges needs to go hand in hand with greater flexibility in terms of the timing, mode and location of the service offered. Physical facilities at the institutions should be more extensively utilised. |
