Transforming the post-school sector in South Africa: Limits of a skills-driven agenda

Abstract

This theoretical and conceptual article explores the planned post-school sectoral reform in South Africa. The reform proposals set out in the White Paper (DoHET 2013) privilege a skills-based transformation agenda which we argue is inadequate to service the needs of a diverse post-schooling sector in South Africa. In addition to a skills-driven discourse that is underpinning thinking about transforming the post-school sector, transformation as a construct has also not been fully engaged with in education policy. We thus also argue in this article that the good intentions that underpin the transformative process do not, on their own drive meaningful change in the sector. As a contribution to the development of a theoretically nuanced framing of transformation and as a prelude to articulating and implementing policy, the article proposes a force field of change defined by four pillars of transformation, which include the need to explore the impetus for change; capitalising on and developing the levers of change; reflecting on theoretical perspectives of educational transformation and understanding the mitigating barriers of transformation. We argue in this article that these aspects have received differentiated but broadly inadequate attention and that this may be partly responsible for the floundering nature of transformation in the post-school sector in South Africa.