Transcript Slide 1

National Qualifications Frameworks:
Promises, pitfalls, premises
INAP/ILO Conference: Apprenticeship in a globalised
world: Premises, promises, and pitfalls
23-24 April, 2013
Stephanie Matseleng Allais
Centre for Researching Education and the Labour
University of the Witwatersrand
Reflections on the ILO study
2009 study in 16 countries
5 early starters through existing research
and documentation:
Australia, the English NVQs, New Zealand,
Scotland, and South Africa
11 case studies through fieldwork:
Bangladesh, Botswana, Chile, Lithuania,
Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Russia, Sri
Lanka, Tunisia, Turkey
Focus on: country context, labour market
issues, nature of education and training
system, evidence of use and impact
Other research
South African NQF
SA skills policy
International lit esp varieties of
capitalism—despite being somewhat
dated, useful insights into
complementarities across social policy,
labour market, and education
Hall, P.A., Soskice, D. (Eds.), 2001. Varieties of Capitalism: The
Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford
University Press, Oxford. AND Iverson, T., Stephens, J.D., 2008.
Partisan politics, the welfare state, and three worlds of human
capital formation. Comparative Political Studies 45 (4/5), 600–637.
Promises met and unmet
Improving communication of qualification
systems: most successes but also problems
Reducing mismatch between education and
training and labour market: very little evidence
Credit accumulation & transfer: +ve & -ve
Recognition of prior learning: little evidence,
small-scale
Access: little evidence
Quality assurance systems and new regulatory,
assessment, and certification mechanisms:
systems created but little other evidence
Pitfalls: Implementation and use in the 16
countries
Social dialogue and the role of stakeholders
– Mainly government-led
– Stakeholder support but weak involvement in many cases,
very little employer engagement
– Complexity of processes and structures
– Concerns and resistance from education & training
institutions
Development & use of level descriptors
Use of learning outcomes
– Difficulty of employer and trade union involvement
– Outsourcing of development
– Un-used qualifications
Solution or symptom?
Rauner (2007, p.118) “When competence
development is disconnected from occupationally organized work and the related vocational
qualification processes, the relationship between
vocational identity, commitment and competence
development becomes loose and fragile. In which
case, modularized systems of certification
function as regulatory frameworks for the
recognition and accumulation of skills that are
largely independent from each other and
disconnected from genuine work contexts.”
Premises
Certificates will help people to get jobs in
informal economies.
Employers know what they want and can
articulate it easily in the required format (reinvention of competencies).
Education providers can ‘manufacture
according to specification’ once
competences are specified (de-emphasis on
building and supporting institutions)
What skills do employers want?
No one “employer view”:
“Serious differences which relate to fundamental views of society and
people, as well as to job demarcations and future trends, inhere in the
process, and are not something which can be solved in a technical
fashion.” Alison Wolf (1995, 104)
Often focused on immediate needs, not able to
predict what skills and knowledge will be required
in the future. Basing a system primarily on
employers’ stated needs can trap a country in the
production strategies of the moment, which may be
on low-wage, low-skill work.
What skills do employers want?
“If a qualification seeks only to mimic a traditional,
restricted and shrinking area of labour market
activity, then it will inevitably have low labour
market currency and become quickly out of tune
with changes in the labour market. It is the
educational element, in particular the integration
of the theoretical knowledge component with
practice, which gives a qualification its longerterm value and which can in turn facilitate rather
than impede the development of the labour
process.” (Clarke and Westerhuis 2011, 143)
What can education do?
Over-specification
Re-iterations of standards
Wish-lists, often including skills best leant
experientially, which may beyond the
capacity of educational institutions to
deliver, and which don’t recognize what it
actually takes to get people to master the
skills and knowledge required in a
particular occupation.
What can education do?
Mechanical notion of education, almost as
if educational institutions are factories
which can simply produce on demand, and
it is a simple matter to change the design
specifications, and produce a different
product.
Solution or symptom?
“...developments in vocational training cannot be
understood solely by examining the inner
dynamics of education and training systems.
They do not acquire their societal significance
and their value for companies and trainees until
they are embedded in the labour market. In
particular, differences in industrial relations,
welfare states, income distribution and product
markets are the main reasons for the
persistently high level of diversity in vocational
training systems.” Bosch and Charest (2010,
p.22)
Solution or symptom?
Keep (2005, 546): “policy interventions
that simply attempt to enhance the quality
of labour supply through addressing the
individual ‘deficiencies’ of young people
are unlikely to succeed and that policy
interventions to decasualize the labour
market are needed.”
Same is not equal: valuing and building
workplace and formal education
Recognition systems like NQFs have
experienced many problems.
Apprenticeships have historically built on the
different strengths of both formal and
experiential learning.
This is ever more important in today’s context.
The current climate undermines both. We need
good jobs and strong education institutions to
have a strong apprenticeship system.