Faculty of Humanities (Research Outputs)

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Vocational education

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    Beyond ‘supply and demand’: moving from skills ‘planning’ to seeing skills as endogenous to the economy
    (2022-11) Allais, Stephanie Matseleng
    This article questions the notion of supply and demand of skills, and, accordingly, the rules and tools that have been developed for skills anticipation in South Africa. I argue that there is nowhere ‘outside’ of the economy where skills are produced. Rather, a society and an economy need to be seen as an organism, where skill formation is a complex set of moving parts. The concept of supply and demand is unhelpful to think about skill formation because it directs our attention towards specific moving parts in isolation from the broader factors that shape them. This explains why, despite the existence of extensive tools and institutions for skills anticipation, and numerous institutions for social dialogue and stakeholder engagement, researchers and policy-makers argue that South Africa has an inadequate supply of the skills that are needed in the workplace and concomitant skills mismatches. The article also presents more specific problems with the rules and tools, particularly in the way the systems and institutions for understanding labour market demand interact with the systems and tools for the supply of skills – especially those tools that govern and shape skills provision. It argues further that, whereas there are real problems with these rules and tools, and while they can certainly be improved, the broad goals that they are intended to achieve will not be attained even with better tools, but that different conceptual lenses are required instead.
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    Will skills save us? Rethinking the relationships between vocational education, skills development policies, and social policy in South Africa
    (Elsevier, 2012-09) Allais, Stephanie
    This paper examines experiences with ‘skills development’ in South Africa to contribute to broader debates about ‘skills’ and the relationships between vocational education and development. Numerous policy interventions and the creation of new institutions and systems for skills development in South Africa are widely seen as having failed to lead to an increase in numbers of skilled workers. I analyze some of the underlying reasons for this by considering South African policies and systems in the light of research in developed countries. The dominant view in South African media and policy circles is that a skills shortage, coupled with an inflexible labour market, are the leading causes of unemployment. This has led to a policy preoccupation with skills as part of a ‘self-help’ agenda, alongside policies such as wage subsidies and a reduction of protective legislation for young workers, instead of collective responsibility for social welfare. Skills policies have also been part of a policy paradigm which emphasized state regulation through qualification and quality assurance reform, with very little emphasis on building provision systems and on curriculum development. The South African experience exemplifies how difficult it is to develop robust and coherent skills development in the context of inadequate social security, high levels of job insecurity, and high levels of inequalities. It also demonstrates some of the weaknesses of so-called ‘market-led’ vocational education.
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    What problem should skills solve? interrogating theories of change underpinning strategies and interventions in Vocational Education and skills in LMICs
    (2023) Allais, Stephanie; Marock, Carmel
    The aim of this paper is to understand the ‘theory of change’ underlying interventions to support vocationalisation of general education as well as vocational education and training (VET) and skills development. The focus is on interventions supported by development agencies and donors, although national policies are also considered, as the agencies work with governments and are both guided by, and influence, their priorities. The first aim is to interrogate what problem VET is seen as the answer to, and how VET is seen to solve that problem (their theory of change). The second aim is to understand the extent to which, and ways in which, vocationalising education is supported and VET favoured, as compared to other components of the education system such as early childhood development, early primary education, or university expansion, as an educational intervention. We found that while some organisations have explicit theories of change—generally multiple theories of change addressing different aspects of the overarching system—many are currently in the process of developing these theories of change. A few state that they do not have a theory of change but rather focus on the development of targets for different components of the system.