Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za EDUCATION, EMPLOYMENT AND SKILLS IN SOUTH AFRICA Edited by Andre Kraak & Karen Press HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Published by HSRC Press Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa www.hsrcpress.ac.za First published 2008 ISBN 978-0-7969-2203-8 © 2008 Human Sciences Research Council The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (‘the Council’) or indicate that the Council endorses the views of the authors. In quoting from this publication, readers are advised to attribute the source of the information to the individual author concerned and not to the Council. Typeset by Christabel Hardacre Cover design by Nazley Samsodien Print management by comPress Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver Te l: +27 (0) 21 701 4477; Fax: +27 (0) 21 701 7302 www.oneworldbooks.com Distributed in Europe and the United Kingdom by Eurospan Distribution Services (EDS) Te l: +44 (0) 20 7240 0856; Fax: +44 (0) 20 7379 0609 www.eurospanbookstore.com Distributed in North America by Independent Publishers Group (IPG) Call toll-free: (800) 888 4741; Fax: +1 (312) 337 5985 www.ipgbook.com Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Contents Preface v Acknowledgements xi Glossary xiii Tables and figures xvii Acronyms and abbreviations xxxiii INTRODUCTION 1The education–economy relationship in South Africa, 2001–2005 1 Andre Kraak SECTION ONE: CONTEXT 2Overview of the economy and economic policy 29 Sandy Lowitt and Miriam Altman 3 Employment shifts and the ‘jobless growth’ debate 50 Haroon Bhorat and Morné Oosthuizen 4The social and human development context 69 Ingrid Woolard and Chris Woolard 5The impact of HIV/AIDS 90 Jocelyn Vass 6The informal economy 111 Richard Devey, Likani Lebani, Caroline Skinner and Imraan Valodia 7 Science and technology policy 134 Michael Kahn SECTION TWO: SUPPLY 8Public expenditure on education 161 Russell Wildeman 9 Early childhood development 185 Linda Biersteker and Andrew Dawes 10 Adult basic education and training 206 Ivor G Baatjes 11 Public schooling 228 Jennifer Shindler Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za 12 Further education and training colleges 254 Salim Akoojee, Simon McGrath and Mariette Visser 13 Higher education 278 Mignonne Breier and Mahlubi Mabizela 14 Enterprise training 300 Simon McGrath and Andrew Paterson 15 Training in the South African public sector 322 Andrew Paterson SECTION THREE: HIGH SKILLS AND THE PROFESSIONS 16 High-skill requirements in advanced manufacturing 345 Jo Lorentzen and Angelique Wildschut 17 Financial services professions 365 Elize van Zyl 18 Veterinary skills 388 Andrew Paterson 19 Pharmacists 410 Elsje Hall 20 Social workers 432 Nicci Earle 21 Engineers, technologists and technicians 452 Rènette du Toit and Joan Roodt SECTION FOUR: INTERMEDIATE SKILLS AND THE MIDDLE OCCUPATIONS 22 Three pathways to intermediate skilling 479 Andre Kraak 23 Intermediate-level workers in the services sector 503 Rènette du Toit 24 The growing skills crisis in the tourism sector 528 Didi Moyle SECTION FIVE: ENTRY-LEVEL SKILLS 25 Training within the South African national public works programme 555 Anna McCord Contributors 577 Index 579 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Preface The Human Resources Development Review 2008 is the second edition in a series of overviews of human resources development (HRD) published by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). The main purpose of the Review is to put in place a significant information infrastructure for use by the state and HRD researchers across the education, training, science and technology, industry, employment and labour market policy domains. Information is a critical prerequisite for effective decision-making in government, but unfortunately it is extremely difficult for government officials to collect and collate the cross-sectoral data required for HRD policy-making. Researchers and journalists experience a similar problem with regard to the scarcity of data on HRD. The HRD Review 2008 aims to fill this gap. The HSRC’s HRD information infrastructure has two components. The first is the series of Reviews of HRD in print format. The second is a multifaceted, Internet-based Data Warehouse providing multi-year data tables extracted from the HRD Reviews, as well as an easy-to-use search tool. These tables and all the chapters in the HRD Review 2008 can be downloaded easily and at no cost from this website (see http://hrdwarehouse.hsrc.ac.za). The HRD Review 2008 is produced by the Research Programme on Education, Science and Skills Development (ESSD) at the HSRC. 1 The Programme focuses on three major research areas: the ‘education system’, the ‘national system of innovation’ and the ‘world of work’. The distinctiveness of the work done in this Programme resides in its ability to harness research work at the interface of these three key social domains, to produce comprehensive, integrated and holistic analyses of the pathways of learners through schooling, further and higher education into the labour market and national system of innovation. The HRD Review series is the flagship project of this Programme. Conception of HRD An important conceptual distinction shaping the content of the HRD Review 2003 was its definition of skills, in particular, its categorisation of skills into three distinct bands: high skills, intermediate skills and entry-level skills. These skill bands can be represented in terms of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) as shown in the table on page vi. The distinctions between these levels are crucial for three reasons. Firstly, as was pointed out in the HRD Review 2003,much of the literature on globalisation and the ‘knowledge economy’ exaggerates the extent of the transition to a new social order in which high skills are the prerequisites for participation in the new economy. The diffusion of the new high- skill production techniques associated with the knowledge economy has in fact been far more uneven than acknowledged in the international literature. It does not totally displace old forms of social and economic organisation, with their associated skill needs. Rather, the v Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za new high-skill sectors coexist alongside older sectors. High skills are not the only skills in demand in the new economy. Workers with intermediate and entry-level skills continue to form the largest percentile of employed populations world-wide. Secondly, there has been a serious neglect of the ongoing importance of intermediate skills in contemporary economies. Even though structural changes have occurred in the South African economy over the past three decades towards greater capital- and skills-intensity, these changes have not dramatically reduced the demand for sufficient numbers of technically competent operatives, artisans and technicians in the manufacturing sectors of the economy. Additionally, the biggest structural change, the rapid growth of the services sector, has also brought with it dramatic increases in the demand for white-collar intermediate-skilled labour – the clerks, sales and administrative personnel who work the services economy. And finally, in an economy characterised by great poverty, unemployment and low levels of labour absorption, the expansion of entry-level jobs in labour-absorbing sectors is of crucial importance to South Africa’s future prosperity. Promotion of HRD across these three skill bands requires a multifaceted strategy. It requires a range of initiatives aimed at expanding export-oriented, high value-adding manufacturing production and services provision, particularly via the implementation of targeted industrial policies in new, globally competitive ‘niche’ areas. Other necessary measures include: a dramatic improvement in the country’s science base; a reversal in the high levels of skilled emigration; and an expansion of appropriately trained high-skill graduates. Secondly, it requires the promotion of ongoing training activities to support intermediate skills, for example, apprenticeship training at further education and training (FET) colleges and technician training at universities of technology. And finally, large-scale job creation schemes triggered by public sector initiatives are urgently needed to assist with high levels of unemployment and despondency, especially amongst the youth. Supply-side institutions HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 vi Three skill bands on the National Qualifications Framework NQF level Skill band 8 High skill (higher education degrees and 7 postgraduate qualifications) 6 5 Intermediate skill (post-matriculation, pre-degree 4 certificates and diplomas) 3 Entry-level skills (pre-matriculation levels) 2 1 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za such as colleges, sector education and training authorities (SETAs) and private sector training centres have a massive task to accomplish in providing entry-level skills and other developmental measures in support of such a low-skill, labour-intensive, employment- creating strategy. Many chapters in this volume contribute to the development of such a multifaceted skills strategy. The need for skills development strategies at the high, intermediate and entry levels is a common refrain throughout the text. The structure of the Review The structure of the present volume is shaped by the HRD Review 2003 in two ways. It continues the comprehensive coverage provided by the HRD Review 2003 as far as is possible. Many chapters, therefore, are updates of work published in the 2003 edition. More importantly, many of the chapters in the HRD Review 2008 are strongly influenced by the three-level conception of skills developed in the 2003 edition. The Introduction and Section One of the HRD Review 2008 examine the context in which HRD takes place. Chapters 1–7 provide an overview of the education–economy relationship in South Africa; the South African economy and economic policy; employment shifts and the ‘jobless growth’ debate; the social and human development context in which education, training and employment takes place; the impact of HIV/AIDS on this context; the informal economy; and science and technology policy. Chapters 8–15 in Section Two focus on the supply-side provision of education and training. The focus, ordering and structure of these chapters mirror very closely the format adopted in the 2003 edition of the Review.Topics included are: public expenditure on education; early childhood development; adult basic education and training; public schooling; FET colleges; higher education; enterprise training; and public sector training. The last 10 chapters, in Sections Three, Four and Five, aim to illuminate the three-way conception of skills discussed earlier. Chapters are distributed across the following sub- divisions: •High skills and the professions (Chapters 16–21) •Intermediate skills and the middle occupations (Chapters 22–24) • Entry-level skills (Chapter 25) These 10 chapters provide comprehensive overviews of several professions (financial services, veterinarians, pharmacists, social workers and engineers) as well as advanced manufacturing skills, and para-professions (artisans and technicians) as well as intermediate workers in the services and tourism sectors. The concluding chapter looks at public sector initiatives aimed at providing entry-level skills for unemployed workers through the Expanded Public Works Programme. Data problems Even though the HRD Review 2008 has assembled a comprehensive collection of data from a wide array of reliable sources, certain cautionary comments must be made. Data problems PREFACE vii Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za are endemic to social science research and to government departments, which are largely responsible for the production and dissemination of socio-economic data. In the South African case, Statistics South Africa is the central statistical agency responsible for the 10-yearly Census data and six-monthly Labour Force Survey (LFS) data used widely by researchers in this edition. These are the most reliable data sets available, but even they suffer certain limitations, for example, small sample populations which disallow rigorous ‘drilling down’ and disaggregation. Even more serious problems occur in line-function government departments such as the Department of Education (DoE), which does not collect administrative data on a systematic and regular basis in crucial areas such as FET colleges, adult basic education and training (ABET), and early childhood development (ECD). Chapters on these topics have had to make do with very old data – 2000 in the case of ECD, 2002 in the case of FET colleges, and 1999 in the case of ABET, with incomplete data sets ever since. Data production in each of these three cases was outsourced by the DoE to contract research providers; the DoE has no internal capacity to undertake data collection itself. These data deficiencies do not enable accurate and confident measurement to be produced by researchers using these data sources. Similar problems are evident in the Department of Labour (DoL), which appears to have replaced routine administrative data collection on items such as the number of apprentices trained per year, with the Performance Indicator results of the National Skills Development Strategy (NSDS) launched in 2001. The DoL is also heavily reliant on the 23 SETAs for data collection on the NSDS, and has little power to ensure data integrity and quality in the production of such SETA data. Another data issue for readers to note is that there are a few instances in which different chapter authors have extracted and customised their own tables from large databases such as the Higher Education Management Information System (HEMIS) or LFS database, with divergent results. These divergences arise from differing computations during the customisation process, and not from errors made in the construction of the data tables. The task of researching off the HEMIS database is complicated further by the fact that it is retrospectively amended from time to time, as DoE officials audit the enrolment numbers provided by institutions. Once exact enrolment and graduation numbers are audited, slight changes in the HEMIS data will inevitably arise. One research account of higher education, using data extracted on a specific date, may throw up different results to another seemingly identical effort, because of the time difference in data extraction. All of these data limitations and restrictions are unfortunate because they make working with data difficult, and data gaps compromise the value of the research results. Reliable administrative data are crucial to good, evidence-led research and policy formulation. It is hoped that one of the effects of the HRD Review series will be to highlight the importance of reliable data for good government policy-making and, in doing so, to put the improvement of data production and collection under the spotlight. The HRD Review 2008 provides the best possible collection of reliable data available in the cross-sectoral field of HRD. This collection of chapters and its massive assemblage of data tables will prove invaluable to government officials who are responsible for decision-making in HRD. It will assist training practitioners in the SETAs and in the private sector with their HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 viii Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za responsibilities for delivering relevant and high-quality training. And lastly, the analysis presented in each of the 25 chapters will be of use to all those academics and postgraduate students who are studying and researching in the field of South African education and training. Andre Kraak and Karen Press General Editors Note 1 The HRD Review 2003 was produced by the Research Programme on Human Resources Development at the HSRC which has subsequently been incorporated within the new research entity, ESSD. PREFACE ix Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za [...]... Industries Standards Generating Body continuing professional development consumer price index Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Certificate in the Theory of Accounting Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology Danish International Development Agency Department of Correctional Services xxxiii HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za DEAT DFID DG... 351 Percentage share of manufacturing in the South African economy, 1995–2004 353 xxvii HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Table 16.6: Table 16.7: Growth clusters in high-technology export, 1995–2004 354 Average annual percentage growth of individual high-technology exports, 1995–2004 355 Table 16.8: Critical review of Sector Skills Plans 357 Table 16.9: Selected categories’ percentage share of... School of Education, University of Cape Town xi HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Sean Archer, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Cape Town Chris Rogerson, Professor, School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand Peter Barron, Specialist Technical Advisor, Health Systems Trust Internal reviewers Andrew Paterson, Research Director, Research... xxxv HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za NLRD NQF NRF NSDS NSF NSFAS NSF: PALC NSI NSS NT OECD OHS PAHC PALC PBMR PDE PMTCT POS PPI PPP PSC R&D RAU RDP S&T SAACE SABCOHA SACMEQ SACSSP SADC SADSAWU SAICA SAICE SAIPA SAIRR SANLI SAPC SAQA xxxvi National Learners’ Records Database National Qualifications Framework National Research Foundation National Skills Development. .. (R’000), by provincial education department, 2001/02–2004/05 169 The percentage of ECD sites that fall below three national infrastructure index poverty lines, by province, 2001 170 xxi HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Table 8.7: Table 8.8: Table 8.9: Table 8.10: Table 8.11: Figure 8.1: Figure 8.2: Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Figure 8.3: Figure 8.4: Figure 8.5: Figure 8.6: Figure 8.7:... public and independent school sectors, by phase and gender, 2001 235 Percentage of children in the population enrolled in school and not in school, by age and province, 2001 236 xxiii HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Table 11.9: Table 11.10: Table 11.11: Table 11.12: Table 11.13: Table 11.14: Table 11.15: Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Table 11.16: Table 11.17: Table 11.18: Table 11.19:... type of institution and gender, 2002–2004 288 Benchmarks for graduation rates (percentage), 2001 and 2004 288 Graduation rates (percentage), by type of qualification, 2002–2004 289 xxv HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Table 13.10: Success rates (percentage) of contact students at all public higher education institutions, by race, 2002–2004 290 Table 13.11: New higher education institutional types,... the number of learners enrolled at a given level of education, regardless of age, by the population of the age group which officially corresponds to the given level of education xiii HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Headcount This refers to the number of individual students in an education institution Headcounts include all enrolments regardless of the length of the course or programme Consequently,... welfare activities, per 100 000 of the population, by province, 2004 438 New demand for social workers due to population growth to retain a ratio of 23.6 per 100 000, 2005–2015 440 xxix HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Table 20.6: Table 20.7: Table 20.8: Table 20.9: Table 20.10: Table 20.11: Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Table 20.12: Table 20.13: Table 20.14: Replacement demand for social... 513 Employment across the services sub-sectors, by race and occupational levels, 2004 514 Employment across the services sub-sectors, by gender and occupational levels, 2004 518 xxxi HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Table 23.8: Distribution of employee educational qualifications across services sector sub-sectors, 2004 521 Table 23.9: Distribution of employee educational qualifications within . www.hsrcpress.ac.za Preface The Human Resources Development Review 2008 is the second edition in a series of overviews of human resources development (HRD) published by the Human. SKILLS IN SOUTH AFRICA Edited by Andre Kraak & Karen Press HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT REVIEW 2008 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Published by HSRC