Sectors & Skills: The Need for Policy Alignment presents the results of a large-scale study of the skill demands of five economic clusters in South Africa:
This study is the second in the 'Student Choice Behaviour Project'. It traces learners who entered higher education and further education institutions and investigates the factors which influenced them. It also considers the achievability of two of the key objectives of the National Plan for Higher Education: to increase the participation rate in the system; and to shift the balance of enrolments away from the humanities and towards the study of business and commerce, and science, engineering and technology.
This volume seeks to critically engage with South Africa's current skills development strategy and to analyse the prospects for a successful upskilling of the population. As the first major South African study within the current international debate on high skills, it is an important and original contribution to the international literature, as well as a major addition to the discourse on South African education, training and development. With chapters by leading South African academics, this collection also includes articles by world-recognised experts on skillsformation systems.
This study forms part of a series of studies on professions and professional education being conducted by the HSRC's research programme on Education, Science & Skills Development. It follows a pilot study on medical doctors, published in 2006 entitled Doctors in a Divided Society: The profession and education of medical practitioners in South Africa.
The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) assesses mathematics and science knowledge of fourth and eighth grade learners around the world. South Africa has participated in six of the seven TIMSS cycles (1995–2019), at the eighth or ninth grade, providing a rich dataset spanning 24 years.
How real is South-South transfer? What does it mean in practice? Why has it become an issue?
Student attrition has been a perennial theme in South African higher education throughout the past decade. In its National Plan for Higher Education (2001), the Department of Education attributed high dropout rates primarily to financial and/or academic exclusions. Four years later, it reported that 30% of students dropped out in their first year of study and a further 20% during their second and third years.
Broadly concerned with grade 12 learner aspirations for the future, this monograph hones in on the aspiration to study education and to enter the teaching profession. The National Policy Framework for Teacher Education and Development in South Africa highlights this as a crucial area for further research - a need which this study attempts to address.
Between 2013 and 2017, a team of researchers from the Human Sciences Research Council undertook a longitudinal qualitative study that tracked eighty students from eight diverse universities in South Africa and documented their experiences at these higher education institutions. Midway through the study, the student protests erupted and focused national attention on many of the stories we had already heard. In the subsequent years of the study, we also heard from students who were actively involved in these transformation struggles as well as those who sat on the
In 1994, the South African teacher education landscape was fragmented across a wide variety of institutional sites. Ten years later, initial teacher education was taking place in a very different environment, shaped by a decade of far-reaching legislative, policy and structural changes. While change was necessary and inevitable after the democratic transition of 1994, successive waves of internal restructuring, college incorporation and higher education mergers placed heavy demands on both academics and management.
Conflicts in schools over race, fees or language frequently make headlines in South Africa. Such conflicts reflect the multifaceted issue of learner diversity, encompassing racial, class, gender, religious, linguistic, physical and other differences. The need to handle such differences in equitable ways poses new challenges for teachers and teacher education. How are teacher education institutions preparing students for teaching in schools that are different from the ones they experienced as learners? What kinds of skills are they providing to enable teachers to deal with diversity and difference amongst learners?
The quality of any national education system depends on its teachers. In recent years in South Africa, teacher supply has become a matter of national concern.