Technical College Responsiveness

Learner destinations and labour market environments in South Africa

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.

Spanning pivotal years in the historic democratisation of South Africa, the essays collected in Bounds of Democracy provide a trenchant reflection on Higher Education in transition.

This monograph reports on the nature of private post-school technical and vocational education and training (TVET) within the further education and training (FET) band in the South African education system. It provides, for the first time, empirical data about the participants, the location and ownership of institutions, the programmes offered, and the delivery of private TVET provision in the country, as well as case studies which explore the character of the sector.

The Low Achievement Trap is an empirical study of student mathematics learning in Grade 6 classrooms that is unique in its focus on two school systems shaped by different political histories on either side of the Botswana-South Africa border. The study provides a detailed examination of the capacity of teachers - how they teach, how much they teach, and what they teach. Because of this wealth of detail, The Low Achievement Trap gives us much greater insight than previous research into why students seem to be making larger gains in the classrooms of South Eastern Botswana than in those of North West Province, South Africa. Rather than identifying a single major factor to explain this difference, the study finds that a composite of inter-related variables revolving around teachers mathematics knowledge and their capacity to teach mathematics are crucial to improving education in both regions. The message is a hopeful one: good teachers can make a difference in student learning.