Shifting Understandings of Skills in South Africa¶
Simon McGrath; Azeem Badroodien; Andre Kraak; Andrew Paterson; David N Ashton; Jeanne Gamble; Lorna Unwin (2004). Shifting Understandings of Skills in South Africa. HSRC Press (Human Sciences Research Council), Cape Town.
| Type | book |
| Scope | Wider apartheid literature |
| Method | mixed |
| Period studied | 1890s–2003 |
| Regions | South Africa, Cape Colony / Cape Province, Bantustans/homelands, Comparative: Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, Germany, UK |
| Themes | education human capital, labour markets wages, origins segregation, business and state, manufacturing industrial policy, inequality poverty unemployment, transition post apartheid, comparative theory, bantustans removals influx, politics ideology elections |
| Citation key | mcgrath2004a |
Argument¶
This edited volume uses a social-institutionalist political-economy lens to argue that South Africa's skills regime has been shaped by racialised and gendered labour-market segmentation, migrant labour and a minerals-energy path, which together produced skills polarisation and a weak intermediate tier. The historical chapters (Badroodien, Kraak, Paterson) show that vocational and industrial education for blacks served social control and low-skill labour supply, while white provision was welfare-linked and then certified. Late-apartheid training reform (Wiehahn/Riekert, NTB/HSRC) is argued to have entrenched a low-skills equilibrium through market faith, voluntarism and unresolved racial schooling. The post-1994 chapters assess the NSDS, SETAs, levy-grant and learnerships, FET colleges and SMME skills policy, finding ambitious institutional design but weak employer buy-in, capacity limits and incoherent policy across departments. Ashton and Kraak debate whether the 'high skills' thesis needs adapting, with Ashton arguing for a low-skills route to jobs and Kraak for a hybrid, simultaneous upskilling model.
Evidence and method¶
Mostly secondary literature, official commissions and reports (De Villiers 1948, Wiehahn, Riekert, Kleu, De Lange, NTB/HSRC 1984/1989/1991), Cape Education Department and SANAC evidence, Native Affairs Department correspondence (Transvaal Archives), Department of Labour and Education policy documents, and post-1994 survey data (HSRC 2000 baseline survey, World Bank Johannesburg SMME surveys, Ntsika firm data, NBI college statistics, Cosser's graduate survey). Comparative evidence on Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland, Germany, UK and Japan is drawn from the high-skills literature (Brown, Green & Lauder; Crouch et al.).
Place in the debates¶
- High skills thesis / low-skills equilibrium and its applicability to South Africa (see Education, Bantu Education and skills). The volume accepts the social-institutionalist high-skills framework but argues it must be adapted: Ashton advocates a positive low-skills job-creation route before upgrading, while Kraak proposes a hybrid, differentiated model with simultaneous upskilling at low, intermediate and high levels.
- Market-led versus state-coordinated skills formation (see Education, Bantu Education and skills). Argues that market solutions are not enough; late-apartheid voluntarism and employer-led training perpetuated low skills, and the NSDS levy-grant and planning regime is a necessary, if capacity-constrained, corrective.
- Economic versus social-control purposes of vocational education under segregation/apartheid (see Education, Bantu Education and skills). Badroodien and Paterson stress social control, 'industriousness' and rural containment of Africans over economic skills formation, rather than a purely labour-market logic.
- Policy coherence ('joined-up' policy) among DoE, DoL and DTI (see Education, Bantu Education and skills). McGrath and Kraak argue policy incoherence, especially the DoE's neglect of enterprise and SMME skills, is a major block to delivery.
- Role of apartheid reform and economic crisis in changing skills policy (see Education, Bantu Education and skills). Argues reforms from the 1970s responded to economic downturn, worker and student militancy (1973, 1976), yet were deliberately partial and left racial schooling and employer voluntarism intact.
Findings¶
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White immigrant craft labour let the state and employers neglect indigenous skills formation. (p. 22)
Crucially, it allowed the state and employers to pay less attention to the role of indigenous skills formation than would have been necessary otherwise.
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Apartheid-era import substitution and an inward focus produced polarised labour demand. (p. 25)
The result was an industrial strategy that produced an unusually bifurcated demand for labour between a high skill segment and a far larger low skill segment (Altman & Meyer 2003).
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White vocational schooling expanded, but employers often preferred cheaper black labour. (p. 42)
This was because employers placed little value on the training provided and preferred to employ cheaper black labour.
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Wartime labour shortages briefly opened skills training to black workers through COTT. (p. 47)
By the end of 1943 nearly 22 000 black workers had been trained at the various COTT centres.
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Late-apartheid reformers shifted the state toward free-market, employer-led training. (p. 70)
All three reports emphasised that the time had come for the state to play a less important role in shaping the economy
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Enterprise training before 1994 was ad hoc and offered little mobility. (p. 63)
Of the firms surveyed by the NTB/HSRC, 66 per cent admitted that they had no recognisable career paths for their workers
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Late-apartheid training reform reinforced a low-skills equilibrium. (p. 80)
In short, the reform proposals of the late apartheid period both perpetuated and reinforced a low skills equilibrium predicated on market regulation
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Bantu Education massively expanded enrolment but at falling per-pupil spending. (p. 99)
Enrolments increased from 882 700 in 1953 to 1 898 600 in 1965; in effect producing a doubling of the school population within one decade.
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Per-pupil spending on African schooling fell as enrolments expanded. (p. 100)
expenditure on African schooling did not rise proportionately, contributing to a decrease in expenditure per pupil from R17.08 in 1953 to R12.70 in 1965
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Agricultural curricula for Africans persist in former homeland schools. (p. 101)
Fully 82 per cent of all schools where agricultural science was taught in 2001 are located on land formerly designated as homeland territory.
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Post-apartheid job creation lagged far behind labour-market entry in the late 1990s. (p. 116)
As Bird (2002) highlighted, while the economy generated 1.1 million new jobs over the period 1994 to 1999, 3.1 million people entered the labour market.
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Post-1994 training still reproduces racial segmentation in high-skill occupations. (p. 161)
In 2000 about 71 per cent of employees trained in the managerial/professional category were white, and only 16 per cent were African
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Post-1994 trade liberalisation skewed manufacturing exports toward skill- and capital-intensity. (p. 238)
Unskilled labour intensive exports declined from 8.9 per cent to 6.8 per cent of total exports between 1992 and 1999, while human capital-intensive exports increased from 49.5 per cent to 58.5 per cent during the same period
Evidence ledger¶
Sources used¶
| Source | Kind | Period | How used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Report of the Commission on Technical and Vocational Education of 1948 (De Villiers Commission) | commission or official report | 1948-1949 | Shows how the state defined technical and vocational education for black learners as discipline and social ordering, and records apprenticeship exclusion. |
| Union Education Department Annual Reports (1912, 1925, 1928, 1938, 1946-7, 1941-45, 1952) | commission or official report | 1912-1952 | Supply institution counts, the COTT training statistics and the policy statements on white industrial and technical education. |
| Carnegie Commission on the Poor White Problem, Education and the Poor White (Malherbe 1932) | commission or official report | 1932 | Gives the estimate of poor whites and the share of rural white boys who went into farming. |
| Malherbe (1977) Education in South Africa, Vol 2, enrolment and expenditure statistics | secondary literature compilation | 1910-1975 | Provides the education expenditure, vocational school enrolment and white urbanisation and farming-share figures used in the historical narrative. |
| Report of the Coloured Education Commission of 1953-6 (Botha Commission) | commission or official report | 1953-1957 | Shows the commission's view that vocational provision for coloured and Indian learners should be manual and community-integrative, and its praise of reformatory training. |
| Transvaal Indigency Commission 1906-8, Industrial Education Committee 1916, Relief and Grants-in-Aid Commission 1917, and National Advisory Board for Technical Education 1913 | commission or official report | 1906-1917 | Show early advocacy of trade training and apprenticeship as the remedy for white indigence. |
| Cape School Board Act 1905, Apprenticeship Act 1922, Higher Education Act 1923, Children's Protection Act 1913, Advanced Technical Education Act 1967 | legislation gazette | 1905-1967 | Serve as the legislative framework showing how skills provision was racially structured. |
| Report of the South African Native Affairs Commission 1903-1905 (SANAC), minutes of evidence and written replies | commission or official report | 1903-1905 | Evidence from witnesses (Muir, Roberts, Sauer, Merriman, Whitaker) on white attitudes to African industrial and agricultural education. |
| Cape Archives PAE Cape Provincial Administration – Education 227 E13; Transvaal Archives NTS Vol 8537 37/360/G (Moila Reserve Local Council) | state archives | 1911; 1940-41 | The Moila Reserve file is a case study of the Native Affairs Department imposing school gardening over books, illustrating agricultural curriculum policy. |
| Newspapers and periodicals (Cape Times, Cape Argus, The Journal, Cape Mercury, Christian Express) | newspapers periodicals | 1887-1911 | Quoted for contemporary white opinion on industrial education for poor whites and Africans. |
| Cape Education Department Native Primary School curriculum (Department of Public Education 1929) and 1936 curriculum (Bot 1936) | commission or official report | 1929-1936 | Time allocations and syllabus content show the manual and agricultural orientation of African primary schooling. |
| Rogers (1949) Native Administration in the Union of South Africa; Loram (1917) | secondary literature compilation | 1912-1935 | Source for Tables 1 and 2 giving numbers of African educational institutions and learners. |
| Hurwitz (1964) The Economics of Bantu Education (employment of African males 1936 and 1951) | secondary literature compilation | 1936-1951 | Table 3 shows the shift of African males from peasant farming to general labour. |
| Unterhalter (1991) Bantu Education enrolment and expenditure statistics | secondary literature compilation | 1953-1975 | Supplies enrolment growth, falling per-pupil spending and homeland primary share figures. |
| South African Senior Certificate Examination 2001 agricultural science entries and school location (Paterson & Arends 2002) | secondary literature compilation | 2001 | Table 4 shows that 82% of schools offering agricultural science are in former homelands, showing curriculum continuity. |
| Keiskammahoek Rural Survey 1952, Social Structure | author survey or fieldwork | 1952 | Evidence of school conditions that prevented practical agricultural teaching. |
| NTB/HSRC Investigations: Training of Artisans (1984), Skills Training in the RSA (1989), National Training Strategy (1991) | commission or official report | 1984-1991 | Core evidence on late-apartheid training reform, including firm survey findings on career paths and sit-by-Nellie training. |
| Riekert Commission (RSA 1979), Wiehahn Commission (Wiehahn 1982), Kleu Study Group (RSA 1983) | commission or official report | 1977-1983 | Establish the shift to market-led, employer-led training policy in late apartheid. |
| De Lange Commission report (HSRC 1981); DNE 1984 certifying council report; DNE 1991 Education Renewal Strategy | commission or official report | 1981-1991 | Document fragmentation of certification bodies and non-articulation of education and training. |
| National Training Board guidelines 1986, annual report 1990, funding report 1995 | commission or official report | 1986-1995 | Describe industry training board design and the failure of voluntarist levy funding. |
| Cosatu (1991) comments on the NTB/HSRC National Training Strategy; Bird (1991) | union or movement records | 1991 | Union critique of employer dominance in the NTS and ITB representation. |
| Department of Labour Green Paper on a Skills Development Strategy (1997) and draft 1996 | commission or official report | 1996-1997 | Source for the design of the new skills institutions, learnerships, levy-grant, planning and SME provisions. |
| Skills Development Act 1998 and Skills Development Levies Act 1999 | legislation gazette | 1998-1999 | Specify SETA functions, levy-grant split (80/20) and the National Skills Fund. |
| National Skills Development Strategy (DoL 2001a) and DoL NSDS Synthesis/Implementation/Annual Reports 2001-2002 | official statistical series | 2001-2003 | Used for levy-payer counts, grants disbursed, learnership numbers and success-indicator progress in Table 5. |
| HSRC Baseline Survey of Industrial Training in South Africa (Kraak, Paterson, Visser & Tustin 2000) | household or labour survey microdata | 2000 | Provides training rates by sector, mode, duration, race, gender and occupation (Tables 8, 10). |
| World Bank/Greater Johannesburg surveys of large manufacturing firms and SMMEs (Chandra et al. 2000a, 2000b) | household or labour survey microdata | 2000 | Used for training rates by firm size, ownership profile and race composition of trainees. |
| Bureau for Market Research SMME skills study (Martins & Van Wyk 2002) and P-E Corporate Services (2001) Investment in Training | household or labour survey microdata | 2001-2002 | Supply additional training rates and in-house versus external training shares for Tables 7 and 9. |
| Ntsika/DTI (1999) The State of Small Business in South Africa 1998 | official statistical series | 1997-1999 | Table 6 gives distribution of enterprises and employment by size. |
| Devey, Skinner & Valodia (2003) informal economy; Statistics South Africa Labour Force Survey 2001 | official statistical series | 2000-2003 | Cited for the informal economy's share of workers and unemployment rates. |
| National Business Initiative Quantitative Overview of the FET College Sector (Powell & Hall 2002) | official statistical series | 2000 | Supplies pass rates, throughput, race and gender composition of FET colleges. |
| Graduate training/tracer survey of 1999 college cohort (Cosser 2003) and employer satisfaction survey (Maja & McGrath 2003) | household or labour survey microdata | 1999-2003 | Used to estimate employment and further-study outcomes of FET graduates. |
| SESD Programme college-level interviews and fieldwork (DoE-Danida, HSRC monitoring) | interviews oral history | 2002-2003 | Interviews and fieldwork underpin claims about college cost per learner and data-quality dissatisfaction. |
| DoE FET policy documents (NCFE report 1997, Green Paper 1998, White Paper 1998, FET Act, Strategy 1999, Landscape 2001, Tirisano 2002) and HRDS (DoE & DoL 2001) | commission or official report | 1997-2002 | Document analysis of how FET and SMME skills were treated across departments to assess policy coherence. |
| White Paper on National Strategy for the Development and Promotion of Small Business (RSA 1995b) | commission or official report | 1995 | Used to analyse the DTI's SMME skills vision. |
| Brown, Green & Lauder (2001) High Skills, including country sector export shares (Table 11) | secondary literature compilation | 1994 | Table 11 data on export shares by skill band are used to argue the importance of intermediate skills. |
| HSRC Human Resources Development Review 2003 chapters (McCord 2003; McCord & Bhorat 2003; Altman & Meyer 2003) and Lewis (2001) trade data | secondary literature compilation | 1992-2002 | Macroeconomic data on jobless growth, unemployment and export composition. |
| DoL SETA evaluations (SETA SSP needs survey 2001; Sector skills plans evaluation 2001) and press reports (Mail & Guardian, Sunday Times, Business Day, Pretoria News) | newspapers periodicals | 2001-2002 | Used to show SETA capacity weaknesses and employer resistance to the levy. |
| Education Panel reports (1963, 1966); James (1992); Hirst & Zeitlin, Kaplinsky, Keep and other comparative literature | secondary literature compilation | 1963-2002 | Used to describe skill shortage discourse in the 1960s and international typologies of skill regimes. |
Inference¶
Quantification: Descriptive tables.
Edited volume. The historical chapters (1-3) rest on qualitative reading of commission reports, legislation, archival files and secondary histories. Chapter 6 is a meta-analysis comparing five enterprise training surveys and DoL reports. The remaining chapters (4, 5, 7-11) are policy-document analysis and theory, applying Brown, Green & Lauder's high skills typology to South Africa and drawing on international comparisons (Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland). There is no regression, natural experiment or formal causal identification.
Key claims¶
| Claim | Basis | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Technical and vocational provision for black learners from 1920 to 1970 was shaped by social control, discipline and indigence concerns rather than economic skill formation, while white provision became differentiated and certified. (p. 41) | De Villiers Commission 1948, Botha Commission 1956, Union Education Department reports and secondary histories (Chisholm, Malherbe), read qualitatively. | Partial data |
| Late-apartheid training reforms (NTB/HSRC, Wiehahn, Riekert, Kleu) were market-led and voluntarist, propped up apprenticeship, fragmented institutions and entrenched a low skills equilibrium. (p. 70) | Close textual analysis of NTB/HSRC reports 1984, 1989 and 1991, the Wiehahn, Riekert and Kleu commission reports, DNE 1984 and Cosatu 1991. | Partial data |
| An 'industrial' curriculum for Africans in the Cape from 1890 to 1930 was in practice rudimentary manual and agricultural training, and agricultural schooling persisted through Bantu Education and the homelands to the present. (p. 92) | SANAC evidence, 1929 and 1936 curriculum documents, Rogers and Loram school counts, Unterhalter enrolments, and the 2001 SASCE tabulation. | Partial data |
| Enterprise training in post-apartheid South Africa remains low and uneven, concentrated in large firms and short courses, and still racially and gender segmented by occupation. (p. 151) | Meta-analysis of the HSRC 2000 baseline survey, the World Bank Johannesburg surveys, the BMR and P-E surveys, DoL levy and grant data, and Ntsika firm-size figures. | Partial data |
| Participation in the NSDS levy-grant system is weak: only about two-thirds of liable employers pay the levy and very few claim grants, so the NSDS targets are at risk. (p. 143) | DoL synthesis, implementation and annual reports (2002) on levy payers, grants disbursed and SETA participation, plus press reports. | Systematic data |
| FET college quality and labour-market outcomes are mixed and policy coherence across DoE, DoL and DTI is weak, especially on skills for SMME and self-employment. (p. 210) | NBI 2000 college statistics, Cosser graduate survey, Maja & McGrath employer survey, and McGrath's reading of DoE, DoL and DTI policy documents. | Partial data |
| The high skills thesis overstates the spread of high skills, and a hybrid differentiated model (high-skill enclave, intermediate, low-skill informal) fits South Africa better. Jobless growth, inequality and macroeconomic policy constrain the NSDS. (p. 226) | Theoretical critique drawing on Brown et al., Crouch et al., Kaplinsky and Hirst & Zeitlin, plus HRD Review macro data from McCord and Altman & Meyer, and GEAR documentation. | Partial data |
| A low-skills, job-creation strategy of the Asian Tiger type could be a stepping stone for South Africa if racial segmentation is removed and the state shapes the market. (p. 114) | Illustrative case narratives of Singapore, Hong Kong and Ireland drawn from Ashton et al. (1999) and Han et al. (1998), plus South African unemployment figures. | Illustrative or anecdotal |
The author's caveats¶
Badroodien notes that South Africa lacks a coherent national data collection point on training, that SETA-level detail is unavailable, and that each study has its own limitations. He also notes that DoL figures cumulate quarterly training and the small-firm percentages are not backed by counts, and that the HSRC survey covered only formal-sector firms. Kraak notes that survey data omit the informal economy. McGrath notes that the NBI lacked data on cost per learner and employment rates and that colleges dispute the data quality. Paterson acknowledges that colonial curricula were not necessarily put into practice.
Gaps in the evidence¶
The historical chapters lack systematic quantitative series on enrolments, completions, apprenticeship numbers by race and employment outcomes. Several statistics are second-hand, from Malherbe, Rogers and Unterhalter, and could be tested against the Union Education Department reports, Native Affairs Department records and census occupation data, which existed then and are archived now. The contemporary claims need firm-level or SETA-level microdata, administrative levy and grant records, and longitudinal tracer data on trainees and FET graduates to assess training effects and employment outcomes. Claims about the high skills thesis and the Asian Tigers rest on selective comparative narrative rather than cross-country or sectoral data on skill and productivity.
Replicability: Data poorly documented.