National Qualifications Frameworks: Promises, pitfalls, premises

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

2. 2009 study in 16 countries 5 earlystartersthroughexistingresearchanddocumentation: Australia, theEnglishNVQs, NewZealand, Scotland, andSouthAfrica 11 case studiesthroughfieldwork: 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 Reflections on the ILO study

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. Solution or symptom? • Rauner (2007, p.118) “When competence development is disconnected from occupa- tionally 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.”

7. 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 (re-invention of competencies). • Education providers can ‘manufacture according to specification’ once competences are specified (de-emphasis on building and supporting institutions)

8. 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.

9. 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 longer-term value and which can in turn facilitate rather than impede the development of the labour process.” (Clarke and Westerhuis 2011, 143)

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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)

13. 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.”

14. 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.