Summary of Recommendations

 Introduction 

The approach we have taken in formulating recommendations has, as the title of this chapter suggests, focused strongly on examining the systems underpinning GET and FET. We believe that this is consistent with the interpretations of open learning presented in this report. As importantly, throughout this research process, we have been very concerned that this policy research might compound the very problems it sought to solve, by adding further complexity to an already complex policy environment. The desire to avoid this mistake constitutes a major driving force behind the recommendations presented in this report.

 Policy, complexity and open learning 

Recommendation One: Too Many Educational Policy Structures

At a high level, decisions have to be taken to halt or significantly slow the pace of certain policy implementation processes, with a view to giving the education system additional space to solve a small number of fundamental problems thoroughly and sustainably. This decision-making process will have to include decisions to dismantle – or temporarily freeze – identified policy implementation structures to create more distinctly phased implementation of policy frameworks.

Recommendation Two: Too Many Regulations

At a high level, decisions have to be taken to massively simplify regulation of education, so that it can focus on ensuring that a few basic aspects of education are implemented effectively and accountably. These decisions should involve focusing attention first on ensuring that money allocated to different educational functions is spent on those functions, rather than on cross-subsidizing other practices. Once accountability in this area has been significantly improved, it will become possible to add other regulatory layers that focus on building quality.

Recommendation Three: Ineffective Communication

Establishment and maintenance of cheap, reliable systems of communication should be identified as a primary priority for the Ministry of Education. Measurable goals should be established to ensure that progress is made quickly in this regard, with clear rewards and penalties for not achieving agreed goals. These could focus on many areas, including the following:

•     Strategic investments in use of e-mail should be made to facilitate communication. Already, many key players in South African education have access to e-mail facilities, so these investments should not be limited to widening infrastructure. They could include distribution of regular, open subscription e-mail newsletters targeting different themes (as well as active recruitment of e-mail addresses to be added to these lists, as even South Africans with e-mail addresses are not yet particularly proactive in searching out information). They could also include establishment of chat forums to explain and discuss key policy positions. They should, however, also incorporate strategic investments in new information technology infrastructure, as well as negotiations with telecommunications providers (Telkom and cellular providers) to widen access to e-mail facilities. These latter investments and negotiations could be undertaken in partnership with the Department of Communication. More detailed ideas are contained in The Feasibility of Establishing a Dedicated Educational Broadcasting Service in South Africa, a policy research document on technological convergence recently completed for the Departments of Education and Communication.

•     Key policy documents should be re-written in simple language, and these accessible versions widely disseminated, physically and electronically. This has already happened in some areas – although some documents of this kind (particularly on Curriculum 2005) end up being as confusing as the original policy. This could start with a short, three- to four-page document highlighting the most important aspects of FET policy (see recommendation eleven). Critically, this work needs to include dissemination of accessible resources in languages other than English, particularly with a view to meeting the communication needs of people outside major urban centres.

•     Strategies to simplify school communication should be considered. This should incorporate re-thinking the relationships of learners and of teachers to the education system. Do they have to engage with the system through an institution (like a school) via a circuit to a district to a province to the national Department? Direct affiliation with a province might be a more efficient and flexible organizing structure.

Recommendation Four: Inadequate Management and Administration

Establishment and maintenance of effective management and administrative systems should be identified as a primary priority for the Ministry of Education. Measurable goals should be established to ensure that progress is made quickly in this regard, with clear rewards and penalties for not achieving agreed goals. These could focus on many areas, including the following:

•     Identifying those agencies – government and non-government – that are currently involved in interventions to build management capacity at educational institutions such as schools and technical colleges. Once this has been done, strategies to increase the impact of their work, by diverting funding away from lower priority activities, should be developed and implemented.

•     Reconsidering the way in which educators and department officials are recognized and rewarded for good performance. New criteria and mechanisms should be developed to recognize and reward excellence of teachers and officials. This process should be linked to establishment of performance management systems, merit-based salary scales, and accountability built into job descriptions.

•     Establishing national commitment to the vision contained in The Feasibility of Establishing a Dedicated Educational Broadcasting Service in South Africa, with a view to focusing future investments made across the education system in ICTs.

•     Making strategic investments in professional development of educational managers across the GET and FET systems. These should seek to move away from the traditional model of short workshops towards more sustained support (even if the number of managers who can be reached is reduced), as the former strategy tends to lead to high costs and low impact.

•     Breaking down territorialism within the Department of Education should be targeted as a key requirement of effective educational implementation. This could be achieved through the establishment of measurable goals for different units and branches within Departments (national and provincial) demonstrating progress in breaking down this unhealthy phenomenon. These goals should include demonstrable progress on inter-departmental and inter-directorate cooperation.

Recommendation Five: Illiteracy

The work of the newly-formed Literacy Agency should be fully supported by all elements of society and government. The Agency needs to be allowed to operate with freedom from the bureaucratic constraints of the Department of Education, particularly with reference to its capacity to raise its own funding (obviously while ensuring that mechanisms to ensure accountability are put in place). The draft concept paper of a literacy campaign developed with input from a range of players should form the foundation of efforts to eradicate illiteracy. The campaign itself will have to take very seriously the requirement of providing literacy in home languages. It will also have to place a special focus on ensuring that the current enrolment of students in the school system do not leave that system illiterate.

 Open learning and distance education 

Recommendation Six: Open Schooling

An Open School does not constitute a viable or desirable policy intervention in South African schooling. Efforts should rather be made to integrate the best and most relevant practices emerging from such interventions around the world into the mainstream GET and FET systems in South Africa.

Recommendation Seven: Learning from Distance Education and Resource-Based Learning

In an effort to encourage the development of increasingly flexible educational provision, we believe it is necessary to do the following:

•     Work systematically through every national policy implementation framework, starting with the systems of gathering national data on GET and FET, to remove unnecessary inflexibilities that may be constraining the growth and development of innovative educational strategies and more flexible institutional systems. The time frame for completing this work in its entirety could be set at five years.

•     Develop a plan of action to make small strategic investments in increasing the capacity of GET and FET providers; including schools to re-design their administrative and logistical systems to accommodate increasing levels of flexibility in educational provision where appropriate. A team tasked to develop such a plan could conceivably complete such a plan in one month, given that further research on needs would not be required.

 GET and FET curriculum 

Recommendation Eight: Curriculum Frameworks

Ongoing improvements to the country’s GET and FET curriculum frameworks are a cornerstone of opening learning, and thus ongoing strategic investments should be made in analysing curriculum from an open learning perspective. In this phase of curriculum review and improvement, we believe the following issues, amongst others, require attention. They could be regarded as items to be used in establishing priorities in these areas. They are include below as examples of the kind of ongoing curriculum review that we consider to be important, rather than constituting a blueprint for curriculum reform.

•     Simplification of Curriculum 2005 policy and, in particular, discontinuing phase and programme organizers.

•     Clarification of the meaning of fundamental, core, and elective learning when applied to GET and FET and in particular articulation of these between ABET, Curriculum 2005, and FET curriculum frameworks.

•     Urgent promulgation of high quality exit level performance indicators as well as assessment strategies in at least the fundamental learning areas of literacy (communication) and numeracy (mathematics) NQF level 1 and 4 exit points (at GETC and FETC levels). Such indicators have been developed (although not yet declared as policy), but they should be carefully assessed to ensure that they are not simply further elaborations of outcomes rather than exit-level performance indicators (which describe assessable levels of performance). Conceptual consistency in exit level performance indicators across different learning areas also needs to be ensured.

•     Development and implementation of nationally administered benchmark assessment of learners at GETC and FETC levels in the fundamental learning areas of literacy (communication) and numeracy (mathematics). With this in place, we believe locally or provincially moderated assessment in other learning areas or in elective and core learning areas will be more flexibly implemented.

•     Modularization and mapping of learning in the FET band and possibly also the senior GET phase to allow for elective learning modules (or short courses) to be phased in, as a sustainable process of curriculum review, modernization and change.

•     Re-emphasis of the importance of appropriate content and supply of suitable learning materials developed by teams of experts

Recommendation Nine: Generating and Disseminating Curriculum Resources

In re-emphasizing the importance of appropriate content and supply of suitable learning materials at GET and FET level, government should take practical measures to break down an unhealthy dichotomy that has been established between content-based and outcomes-based education. This should be done through establishment of a national Curriculum Resource Coordination Agency. The mission of this agency should be to implement strategies to provide educators in GET and FET the content and content they require to bring developing curriculum frameworks alive form an educational perspective. Its work should not be prescriptive, but should focus on providing support to educators and over time an increasing range of choices for them as they seek to implement learning programmes. The Agency should have the following features:

•     It should be provided operational freedom from the Department of Education, to allow it the space to negotiate a wide range of partnerships and working agreements. To ensure accountability, it should be required to submit three-year rolling plans every year to the Ministry and Department of Education, which include detailed projected outputs that can be used to measure its progress in key areas.

•     It should be funded nationally, but should establish regional hubs to ensure that it focuses on providing extensive support to provincial departments of education. It should actively seek a range of income streams in addition to government funding, including: advertising revenue; sale of resources; regional agreements with other SADC governments; sponsorship; and money from funding agencies.

•     Its work should be based on establishing partnerships with a range of key agencies, in government, parastatal, commercial, and non-profit sectors.

•     It should focus on ensuring that curriculum resources recognize, enhance and support indigenous cultural values and educational principles. Thus, the Agency should have funds available to support development of curriculum content and resources to redress imbalances in the content that currently permeates GET and FET education systems.

•     It should focus on ensuring that resources are made available in various languages, to accommodate the different learning requirements of South Africa’s learners. In the first instance, this work should focus on literacy resources (working with the Literacy Agency) and foundation phase resources.

Recommendation Ten: Roles for Information Technology

A Curriculum Resource Coordination Agency should make strategic investments in online curriculum management systems. These will capture detailed information on curricula for GET and FET educators and learners, allowing for easy printout of or online access to all relevant curriculum materials, statements of outcome, assessment strategies and criteria, descriptions of learner support strategies, and all other pertinent curriculum information. It will also contain integrated feedback mechanisms, thus leading to systematized quality assurance strategies and real-time improvement of curricula frameworks.

 Further education and training 

Recommendation Eleven: Establishing a Vision

Develop an official government pamphlet – not exceeding four pages – articulating in simple terms the vision of government (as reflected in both Department of Education and Labour policy) for the FET field, with a particular focus on how this vision links to social development. This vision should seek to strip away the confusing jargon surrounding many of the new structures surrounding FET implementation, and provide people in the many linked sectors comprising FET a clear understanding of how what they are doing fits into that vision. The resulting pamphlet should be circulated widely to FET practitioners in South Africa, using both electronic and print resources (not government gazettes) to support the exercise. This should be seen as a straightforward compilation exercise, requiring an implementation timeframe of no longer than three months.

Recommendation Twelve: Organizing Implementation and Revising Timeframes

Clear, seperate plans should be developed for each of the different sectors rising FET. This should start with the development of individual, FET-specific plans for schooling, technical colleges, and workplace-based training. The Departments of Education and Labour should jointly develop these plans. Each plan should reflect how it links with the others, but they should not be conflated into a single plan at this stage. As part of this work, unrealistic timeframes should be reworked to allow slower, more systematic development of the FET field over five to ten years. This work should be seen as a practical way of moving forward in the FET field on implementation of recommendations one and two.

Recommendation Thirteen: Research into Learnerships

Research should urgently be undertaken into the costs of running learnerships, as well as the success rates of learnerships in leading to longer-term employment opportunities. This research should seek to identify strategies for enhancing the cost-effectiveness of learnerships so that their educational potential can be realized on the scale envisaged by much FET policy. Linked to this research, it will be critical to explore strategies for companies and particularly smaller companies, being able to claim funding back from the Skills Levy for learnership-related activity.

 Education and development 

Recommendation Fourteen

The development agenda must shape all the processes and mechanisms for education. If there is no clear articulation and shared development agenda, then the relevant section of national and provincial government must work together to establish the agenda. This approach should underpin implementation of all the other recommendations contained in this report. For example, shared development agendas should:

•     Inform which policy implementation processes to freeze or slow down;

•     Provide clear sets of priorities in resolving problems of communication, management and administration, and illiteracy;

•     Underpin the establishment of goals of targets for government education departments, as well as any other educational structures (such as the Curriculum Resource Coordination Agency);

•     Guide the establishment of inter-departmental partnerships; and

•     Form the basis of statements of vision for the FET system