ADEA/FSU Biennial Research Programme

Sub-theme: Formal/ Nonformal Complementarity

Roy Williams, Sached Trust

August 1997.

Educational policy development in South Africa has produced volumes of documents since the late Eighties. This occurred within a policy environment which was specific to the last years of the Apartheid struggle, and then beginnings of the new democrat ic state, and particularly the first two years of the Government of National Unity.

The policy environment was characterised firstly by a commitment to inclusive consultation, to establish a democratic culture within which reconciliation and nation-building would take root. This was a complete change from the autocratic decision mak ing of the Apartheid state. However, one needs to be careful that in the process of inclusive consultation it can become "over-owned", in which case the process becomes more complex than necessary, and implementation can get delayed. In addi tion, the uneven nature of participation in lengthy and expensive national consultations has to be carefully managed.

Secondly, successful participative policy formulation requires a two-tier approach. At the broadest level, all stakeholders must be involved to determine the overall goals and benchmarks. At a more detailed level, in which technical and professiona l issues are dealt with, policy formulation must be delegated to specialists with technical and professional expertise. The results of these technical processes can then be reported back to stakeholders for endorsement.

Thirdly, policy development after the election in 1994 took place within an emerging human rights culture, which was crucial to the process of setting up a constitutional democracy. Attempts were made to translate these rights into practice through th e Reconstruction and Development Project, which unfortunately ended up in massive underspending, and was closed down.

Within this policy environment, curriculum development in nonformal education was developed thanks to the initiatives of a variety of NGOs. NGOs developed curricula largely implicitly, driven more by the immmediate need for materials than issues of t he systematic development of curricula. It is an interesting question for further research as to whether this approach provided more contextually-sensitive programmes or not. Certainly some of the programmes developed in this manner were influenced mo re by the developers’ ideological and methodological preferences than by the specifics of the learners’ contexts.

Curriculum development in Sached Trust adopted a specifically curriculum- and systems-driven approach. Their ASECA programme (A Secondary Education Curriculum for Adults) was based on the outcomes of a national consultative conference on education, c onvened by Sached, as well as a national needs survey commissioned by Sached. ASECA engaged extensively with stakeholders in an inclusive process (within the boundaries of the progressive education sector.

The development of the ASECA curriculum was a major national initiative, covering as it did most of the entire academic high school curriculum. Several other processes occurred simultaneously. These are covered in some detail in Aitchison’s paper. The National Education Policy Initiative (NEPI), the Training Board’s National Training Strategic Initiative, the RDP policy document, the ANC policy document (the Yellow Book) and the subsequent Implementation Plan for Education and Training, were all f ormulated within extensive consultation at this time. Sached took an active part in many if not all of these processes. The broad thrust of the ASECA curriculum framework arose out of these processes, and was also informed by international consultation . The curriculum included an applications-based and contextually-grounded approach to adult education; a modular, flexible, open learning approach; and an approach which framed learning within learning fields (such as integrated social studies and integr ated sciences) rather than within existing school subjects.

In order to achieve an integrated and applications-based approach, there was a need for a single Ministry of Education and Training. This was not achieved. The planned "close working relationship" between the two Ministries, of Education a nd Labour, has not yet been consolidated - at least not in Adult Education, although a lot of work is being done.

The development of language curricula has been constrained by the inexact processes of national consultation, and the demand to get policy out quickly. The Interim Guidelines for ABET fudged the issue of the need for separate first and additional la nguage curricula, and decided on an all-language curriculum which is probably only barely workable. It is being revised in current national curriculum processes, but no clear policy has yet emerged to deal with these issues. The issue is, if anyt hing, more crucial to the formal sector than the nonformal sector, and if it is not dealt with in the nonformal sector, the formal sector is unlikely to endorse it, and complementarity and cooperation on language curricula is unlikely.

The Interim Guidelines process dealt with adult education up to GETC level (junior high school). The accreditation of the FETC (senior high school) section of the ASECA curriculum was a separate, more difficult, and even tortuous process, over two ye ars. Part of the problem was that the initial development of ASECA took place largely within a Mass Democratic Movement, or MDM-inclusive process, which was then put forward for formal accreditation in a Government of National Unity-inclusive< /I> process. Not surprisingly, some of the post-election players in the new consultative processes were not happy that they had been not been involved in the pre-election consultative processes, and thus in the development of ASECA. This was a bad start for relations between curriculum developers in the formal and nonformal sectors, as the pre/post election inclusivity boundary coincided with the boundary between the nonformal and formal sectors.

This was a very deliberate strategy to achieve peace, and avoid the threatened right-wing backlash, by taking everyone on good faith. The working assumption was that if everyone really did have a stake in the new South Africa, and if their voices as < I>stakeholders were heard, they would behave in constructive fashion, and reconciliation could be achieved. Reconciliation would then be the basis for development and growth.

This has worked remarkably well in terms of policy development, and participation, and it has provided the overall modus operandi for the development of curricula in education.

Within policy development, this meant that decisions had to be taken only after extensive consultation. The benefit of such a system is that when decisions are taken, and the implementation plans are put into place, they are "owned" by ever yone concerned. This was certainly the thrust of the initial stages of policy development in adult and nonformal education.

Everyone is now committed to a consultative process. However, many of the finer details of how to manage such a process are only beginning to emerge now, in the light of the frustrations of managing the change to a more democratic system.

The most obvious need is to avoid overshoot in the ownership process. It has been remarked that in many sectors, decisions are over-owned to such an extent that nothing gets done. This is partly the problem captured in the clich&eacut e; that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. It is also the problem of what has been referred to as a nation of paranoids, in which decision makers are so busy looking over their shoulders to see whether some undetected stakeholder has not been consulted, that they cannot keep their eye on what needs to be implemented. The SACABET process in 1994/5, outlined in more detail in Aitchison’s paper, was a prime example of an over-owned process. It delivered political consensus, but little im plementable policy. I do not agree entirely with Aitchison’s views on the National Stakeholder Forum, which I am sure he would say is similarly over-owned, but there is certainly some truth in it.

Secondly, if one is committed to a stakeholder-consultative process, it is essential to manage the distinctions between the consultative and professional issues. In other words, it is desirable for stakeholders (everyone who has an interest in the ma tter, in South Africa) to be consulted on the general intentions, and mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating implementation. It is however not desirable for them to be involved in the detailed professional and technical issues of how those general i ntentions and benchmarks get translated into policy and planning. At the seminar on Adult Education and Development at the South African Development Bank in 1996, several state departments said explicitly that they were no longer prepared to attend the meetings of the National Stakeholders Forum unless the distinction between detailed professional issues and general stakeholder issues was made clearer, formed the basis of differentiated meeting agendas, and strictly adhered to.

The more recent national consultative conference on Further Education (grade 10-12) did not, to a large extent, to manage this distinction between consultative and professional/technical processes, and did not achieve what it could otherwise have done. In many ways it was a reversion to the approach of SACABET, despite the fact that prior to the conference some valuable work had been done in commissions which did operate on the basis of this distinction.

Thirdly, national consultative processes are inherently expensive, and what has happened in the National Stakeholders Forum is that the ability of some factions of the business sector, for instance, to finance their own participation, has led to uneven participation in the Forum by people who are not as representative as they should be.

Anther crucial characteristic of the policy environment in the emergent South African state was the determination by the ANC to establish and entrench human rights, so that the devastation of the abuse of state power in the past would n ever be repeated.

This has led to what some have said is the best constitution in the world. After a long debate, the constitutional assembly avoided the temptation to include social rights, such as the right to health, shelter, freedom from hunger, an d so on, in the constitution, as these could not be upheld or enforced.

The constitution did nevertheless include many other provisions which are difficult if not impossible to implement in the short term. This brings the value of the constitution into question. For instance in Chapter 2 of the Constituti on - in the Bill of Rights,  Section 29:

1. Everyone has the right -

(2) Everyone has the right to education in official language of choice.

Related to this is the list of Presidential RDP Lead Projects, announced in September 1994, in which adult basic education was a lead project but, of the more than two billion Rand in the Lead Projects list, the state committed nothing at all to adult basic education, stating baldly that it would be "donor funded until 1997." In effect donors did make funds available, alongside state funds, through the Reconstruction and Development Project (RDP), and partly direct to NGOs. However, the RDP achieved spectacular under-expenditure of nine billion Rand, and was effectively closed down. And the implicit shift to substantial state funding "after 1997" has yet to materialise.

Laudable as the insistence on human rights in the bill of rights is, the gap between principle and practice is so vast as to encourage only cynicism.

The proportion of the educational budget for adult basic education is barely creeping up from 0,05% to 0,06% (1996-1997). Any challenge to the Constitutional Court demanding that the state give substance to the rights of all adults to basic education would put the state in a difficult position. Given the allocation of resources, the state’s only option would be to amend the clause 29 (1) (a) of the constitution to resemble clause (b) which is so heavily qualified as to be of little force and effect.

The beginnings of an MDM-type consultation on adult education took place during the 1990-94 negotiation period, at a major national meeting on education, convened by Sached in 1992 and a similar conference on adult education in 1993. Arising out of t his process, Sached’s curriculum development process was begun.

At the time there were a number of initiatives in materials development at ABET #1-3, (see footnote 1) which were implicitly curriculum development processes to some extent. They produced some excellent materials, (see Aitchison for more detai ls), but these were not intended to be produced within a unitary curriculum framework. It was only later that the curriculum development was formalised, within the framework of the Interim Guidelines on numeracy and language, in September 1995.

I will come back to several issues related to these guidelines.

Sached at this time surveyed the existing curricula at high school levels, and not surprisingly came to the conclusion that the materials used in adult classes at high school levels (which were Bantu Education school materials) were not adult, o r South African, or appropriate to adult working and life skills needs. Accordingly, Sached commissioned the first, and to date only, national needs survey for adult education at these levels (1993).

The results were that adults needed a curriculum which was related to their working and home lives, which was South African and reflected their reality and environment, which stressed applied knowledge, and which was modular and open learning in format , so that it could be accessed by adults who generally speaking cannot attend full-time formal education.

This needs survey was the basis for the ASECA project. It stated off as an Alternative Secondary Education Curriculum for Adults, and has, since the election, dropped the term Alternative, as it is now accepted as part of the NQF.

Sached was fortunate to enjoy considerable donor support (until the chaos of 1994-95 and the RDP) for this process. As part of the Mass Democratic Movement, Sached put into practice the inclusive consultative processes which were the hall-mark of the MDM, and which were later to inform the development of the new state. This meant that the process of curriculum development included not only the national needs survey, but also extensive consultation with stakeholders throughout the country.

There was however one important difference, in that the nature of the "inclusivity" was limited to people and institutions aligned with the MDM. This was because of the substantial formal strength of the Apartheid education system, which di d not see any need to consort with curriculum development initiatives in the MDM. The MDM in turn did not see itself as collaborating with a formally very strong state sector, which was committed to a racist and educationally suspect system, and was ent irely unsympathetic to any change whatsoever. In addition, members of the state sector, even if they were individually sympathetic to the curriculum initiatives of the MDM, were keenly aware that many of the educational activities of the MDM sector were implicitly or explicitly regarded as illegal, and being involved in them led to state repression such as bannings, detention, and state closure of educational institutions and newspapers.

This led to a confined but yet broadly "inclusive" consultative process for the development of the ASECA curriculum, which was to have some problematic implications for accreditation later on.

While the ASECA curriculum, and the accompanying open learning materials, were being developed, several other processes were in place. The debate on adult education curriculum moved early on into the direction of subjects (now called fields of lear ning) which were not only more applied, but also more appropriate to adults’ lives outside of education - particularly integrated social studies and combined sciences.

The applied nature of the curriculum started to be strongly influenced by the process driven by labour and business, resulting in the National Training Strategic Initiative document in early 1993. This proposed a definite shift into competency, and then outcomes based education and training. This was subsequently formalised in the passing of the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) Act in late 1995, which set in motion the setting up of the authority (in 1996-97) to put into pl ace the National Qualifications Framework (NQF).

The NQF is an all encompassing framework which seeks to put into place, and co-ordinate, outcomes based education, across vertical articulation between its eight levels, and across horizontal portability between units at the same level. It also seeks to facilitate the provision of a variety of contextually- sensitive and -relevant learning programmes, while maintaining a unitary overall set of learning objectives, or unit standards for each field of learning.

The debate on the need for a single Ministry of Education and Training was also formulated at this time. This was an attempt to forge links, if not to merge, the development of curricula for the formal (schools/education) sector and the nonfo rmal (adult) sector, and the nonformal (industry/training) sector.

The RDP policy document in 1994, and the ANC and then IPET (Implementation Plan for Education and Training) documents captured the need for integrated subjects, or fields of learning, for adults - particularly in social/development studies, and in int egrated sciences &/or technology. They also increasingly across this time, and into the Education White Paper process (late 1994- early 1995) started to stress the need for Open/ Distance/ Life Long Learning.

The ASECA curriculum development related closely to these developments, if for no other reason than that many of the people in ASECA and SACHED were closely involved in the RDP and ANC policy development processes.

The ASECA consequently shifted to an outcomes based approach, consolidated its integrated approach to humanities and sciences, as well as its applications based approach, and was increasingly supported in its open learning methodology.

At national level the move to form a single ministry of education and training failed. Two Ministries, of Education and Labour were maintained, and are still developing an effective joint working relationship.

Following the failure of the SACABET process, and the appointment of the first senior staff member in Adult Basic Education at National level within the Department of Education, the Department of Education set up a National Stakeholders Forum (NSF) in mid-1995, consisting of people across the spectrum, but not effectively across National Departments, and specifically not including any high level participation from the Department of Labour, or any substantive working relationship with the formal school sector until very recently.

This effectively not only separated the nonformal adult sector from much of what the Department of Labour was doing, (a split within the nonformal sector, as it were), but also separated the nonformal adult sector in the Department of Education (DoE) from its formal schools sector.

However, this was not entirely a bad thing.

There has always been a split between the general educationalists (including the schools sector) and the narrowly focused applications-or-bust sector (representing short term business interests). In the short term (1995-96) the business sector certain ly had the upper hand, in terms of the economic power they represented, and the experience and institutional back up from the numerous Industry Training Boards. The newly appointed management in the formal educational sector, because this sector had been a crucial part of the reactionary Apartheid state, took a long time to formulate its alternatives to both the substantial remnants of the Apartheid state still within its ranks, and the powerful and conservative elements in the Training Boards.

It is quite possible that the DoE was fortunate to have its own space within which to develop its own curriculum. Subsequently it has probably erred in not moving more decisively to engage with the Department of Labour, but that issue will be t aken up later in this paper.

In any event, the National Stakeholders Forum proceeded in formalising the Interim Guidelines for ABET in late 1995, using the considerably skills and efforts of the NGO sector - the Independent Examinations Board, Sached, and the National Literacy Co- operation, as well as labour and business. It did, to its credit, implement the distinction between the professional/technical aspects on the one hand, and the stakeholder concerns on the other hand, in curriculum development. Effectively (as also indic ated in Aitchison’s paper) it captured much of the implicit/explicit curriculum development in NGO-produced materials at ABET #1-3, and transcribed the ASECA curriculum at ABET #4 into the Guidelines. The document put into place the first nationally sanc tioned (and "owned") curriculum for numeracy/mathematics and for language across basic education (Grades 0-9). This was a remarkable achievement.

Within these initiatives, two particular issues still had to be addressed: the issue of first and additional languages, and the issue of accreditation for entrance into tertiary education institutions.

The Interim Guidelines were a huge step in the right direction. The language issue, however, left much to be desired. In order to satisfy the pressing need for a widely owned set of guidelines, the drafters of the Guidelines fudged the issue of firs t or second/additional language curriculum. (See Harley et al 1996: 305-307 for a further discussion on this).

Sached’s position, which we believe is backed up by credible international research, is that there is no such thing as an all-language curriculum. In contrast, Business South Africa (a sector of business and training) argued strongly for this approach. Their argument was that if the curriculum was to be outcomes based, the outcomes should be specified irrespective of the level of progression of the learner, or their first/second language status.

This confuses the requirements for particular outcomes for particular jobs, with the sequence and progression in which first and second language learners achieve different aspects of language outcomes. It confuses the ends with the means. In the cur rent curriculum policy development in South Africa, outcomes (captured in detailed unit standards) are specified at a broad curriculum level, and learning programmes are specifically meant to be able to related to the outcomes in different ways. T he ideal within the NQF, is that several learning programmes should be able to satisfy the requirements of a single set of outcomes, and that each learning programme should be able to contextualise the outcomes for different situations and needs.

While it is quite feasible to specify a minimum requirement in terms of language outcomes

for a particular job, this is less than helpful in designing a sequence of outcomes, or a set of learning programmes, for particular language learners. First language learners, especially adults, have little or no need for outcomes to be specified, or learning programmes to be constructed, for basic oral competencies. Second language learners do, and in an outcomes based / applications based approach, oral competence is the key aspect of additional language learning that is most often neglected.

The case of ABET #4 language is even more worrying. The Interim Guidelines were written to capture and codify existing practice, so that national adult education could make a start on co-ordination, and achieve standardised accreditation through the I ndependent Examinations Board (the IEB).

However, the ASECA language curriculum, which was transcribed with few changes into the Interim Guidelines, was part of a larger ASECA curriculum project. The ASECA project had extensive, but not limitless, funding, a choice had to be made on the deve lopment of language curriculum. It was not possible to develop first and second language curricula, and in any case the overwhelming need for adults was for second language (English). The ASECA project also sought to avoid the fragmentation of much of t he ABET#1-3 development, by consciously developing its curriculum in an integrated fashion for each subject across all levels (which were at one stage referred to as ABET 4 & 5, and are now most commonly referred to as GETC and FETC - the General and Further - Education and Training Certificates).

What ASECA did was to develop the ABET #4 and #5 English courses in an integrated, modular curriculum, as English Second Language. What the Interim Guidelines did was not only to avoid/confuse the issue of first and second language, but further than that, to take an explicitly second language curriculum and establish it as national policy for an "all-language" curriculum.

There is a delayed-action problem waiting to happen here. For while it is the case that most if not all of the language programmes, and assessments at ABET #4, are in fact, for second language (English) learners, this will not always be the case. Th ere will be learners for whom English is a first language, or can be regarded as such, just as there will be people wanting to learn languages other than English, who are clearly first language speakers of those languages, who might find themselve s in a programme quite soon which is based on the Interim Guidelines, and thus is a second language curriculum.

Within the current curriculum processes at national level (Learning Area Committees and the ABET Curriculum Committee) these issues are being addressed. It remains to be seen whether the first/additional language curriculum issues will be resolved sat isfactorily.

This has major implications for the complementarity between the formal and nonformal sectors. For while it is, at a stretch of credulity, perhaps possible that adult programmes could live with the problems of confused language programmes, this cannot be tolerated in the formal school sector, where the differences between first and second language competence is much more marked. If the issue if not resolved, the issue of equivalence, let alone complementarity and co-operation, between the formal and nonformal sectors will be almost impossible to resolve.

Accreditation in the FETC sector is complex. South Africa has a two tier system, with many variations. Basically, students finishing school (Grade 12) can get either a Senior Certificate, which allows them into tertiary courses, or a Senior Certifi cate with Matriculation Exemption, which allows them into degree programmes.

In order to get a curriculum accredited for degree entrance purposes, the Committees of University and Technical Principals (CUP and CTP) have to recommend the courses to the Minister of Education, who will then gazette them as nationally accredited curricula.

To return to the discussion on the nature of policy formation in the new South Africa, and the nature of inclusive consultative processes: I have outlined the heritage of consultative processes in the MDM, which were carried over into the new state. I have also indicated that ASECA, as part of the MDM, implemented an inclusive process which was really only MDM-inclusive, for specific historical reasons. This meant that various people who had been central to State curriculum development pro cesses during the time of the Apartheid state were excluded from the ASECA process.

In mid-1995, ASECA submitted its FETC curricula to a technical committee process consisting of the CUP, the CTP, the IEB, Sached, the National Department of Education, and the Gauteng Youth College (GYC, who were beginning to implement the ASECA progra mme in Soweto), so that they could be accredited nationally for tertiary entrance. ASECA and the GYC also submitted a proposal for a Composite Certificate, which would enable learners to be awarded a tertiary entrance certificate which combined AS ECA, technical, and school subjects. This was an important innovation in terms of achieving the optimum complementarity between the formal and nonformal sectors, and managing the curriculum change process.

However, despite the fact that the ASECA curricula had been circulated to the CUP in January of 1995, this did not reach the right people, and if and when it did, they were at a loss to know what to do with it. The people concerned had not been involv ed in the development of the ASECA curricula, and the CUP had not circulated sufficient accompanying explanation as to what this rather strange looking curriculum was intended to achieve.

Consequently, many of the people concerned in CUP and CTP accused ASECA of not being totally inclusive, which was by now mandatory within the Government of National Unity framework for policy development. What was not discussed was that the nature o f "inclusive" consultation had changed over the period 1993-1995. Further, the considerable risks and state repression which were once the inevitable consequence of participation in MDM-inclusive processes had now fallen away.

The Vector or Sequence of formal and nonformal curriculum development had changed. Previously, the formal dog wagged the nonformal tail. Or to put it another way, the major educational sector, schooling, determined curricula, which wer e then dumped (in the case of South Africa) onto adults who had no choice in the matter. The CUP concerned itself primarily with tertiary access from the school sector, and allowed the adult sector to tag long behind, as long as it did not make any spec ial demands.

What the adult sector, and Sached in particular, had identified was a gap in curricula provision and development, in the adult sector. The NGO sector had grasped this unique opportunity, and proceeded to use it to develop new and innovative curricula which they would never have had the opportunity to develop in the conservative, inertia-loaded, state-controlled school sector.

It was only when the nonfomal curricula development started to request national accreditation that everyone woke up to the fact that the NGO sector had stolen a march on them, and that there was a distinct possibility that ASECA would be the first nati onally accredited outcomes based curriculum across the entire high school sector. They had been caught napping, and the nonformal adult tail was in danger of wagging the formal school sector dog. This did not endear ASECA to the status quo . In fact one members of the technical team said that: "Only over my dead body will I allow ASECA to sneak curriculum change into the school sector through the back door of adult education".

In the event, the technical team, with some delays in the accreditation of the science course, are in the process of finally accrediting the entire ASECA curriculum at FETC level. And they are enthusiastic about the developments, and have given it ve ry valuable support.

What they are most enthusiastic about is that the cumulative growth of a content-bloated curriculum was finally halted in its tracks, and a performance-based, rather than purely memory based set of achievements had finally found its way to the forefron t of curriculum design and development. Their initially strongly negative attitudes to outcomes based education were reversed, and they have been exceedingly helpful and generally very constructive ever since.

However, the fight about the formal and nonformal use of the programme had gone on for two years, unabated. The issue initially was quite clear. ASECA had applied to the Department to set up a technical team process to seek accreditation for tertia ry entrance. The Department, in the person of Dr Niebuhr, was also quite clear. Accreditation could only be sought for the curriculum in the broadest sense, and without restriction. If it was to be accredited, it had to be accredited as acceptable for anyone. There is no such thing as a curriculum that is at an acceptable standard for some people and not for others.

But the issue of school use of ASECA kept cropping up, leading to the extreme remark quoted above. ASECA’s point of view was, and is, that the curriculum was developed for adults, and that the DoE must decide whether or not it wants to implement the curriculum in whatever learning institutions it chooses. The implementation is a separate issue, and one which we did not want to concern ourselves with.

The move to restrict ASECA went even further. It was initially only accredited for the Gauteng Youth College (an RDP project) and "similar institutions" - of which there were, strictly speaking, none, as it was the first of its kind. This h as subsequently been removed, but only after about a year of intense lobbying.

There was also a restriction early on in 1997, namely that ASECA courses would have matric "equivalence", but not matric "status." What this ridiculous distinction meant was that each student would have to negotiate the "statu s" of each ASECA course he or she had passed with each tertiary institution to which they wanted to apply. Death by exhaustion. This too has been reversed after months of lobbying.

A further restriction was the "two sittings" rule. It had been the case that part-time senior certificate students not only had to pass the required 6 subjects for tertiary entrance at no more than two sittings, but they also had to be emplo yed at the time, and in effect had to pass three subjects at the second sitting, even if they had passed five subjects at the first one. The employment criterion seems to have fallen into disuse some time ago. The two sittings rule was non-negotiable as late as February 1997. More lobbying, and it too has finally been rescinded.

The curriculum is finally being accredited, but it still carries a ban on its use in any schools, or for learners under 18 years of age. In order to give effect to this ban, the DoE has been forced to create a special non-school category for gazetting purposes. Previously curricula were used across school and adult sectors. They were all gazetted under NATED 550 (now REPORT 550), and a it happened, happily dumped on the adult sector. Now that the reverse is the case - there is an adult curriculum that could be used in schools - the DoE has found it necessary to create a special category (probably 551) for use for adults, and under no circumstances for schools.

There are a number of aspects of the problem that need to be unpacked. Despite the absurdity of much of what has been outlined above, there is an argument to be made that, at least, major curriculum change in schools must be addressed with circumspec tion, as it could end up merely being disruptive, and the damage confusion in schools could be many orders of magnitude greater than what might occur in the much smaller adult sector. (Of course this argument does have within it some seeds of an attitude to the adult sector which holds that damage in the adult sector doesn’t matter as much as in the school sector). There is also the argument that school and adult curricula should be different. This might or might not be true at GETC (Grade 8-9) level, but should not apply at FETC (Grade 10-12) level.

On the other hand, the ASECA curriculum does offer an unprecedented opportunity for addressing the urgent political and educational issue of transformation. It does offer a South African, outcomes based, open learning curriculum, with a well develope d and reasonably mature continuous assessment and placement function. To refuse to use it at least in some schools, to test whether it would be of value, instead of imposing a ban, sight-unseen as it were, seems to be to be throwing out the baby, the bath-water and the bath itself out, in a situation where there are few if any credible alternatives which could be the basis for transformation of education in the next few years, not to mention the enormous expense of starting to re-invent the ASECA wheel from scratch.

What has happened, and is positive and encouraging, is that after 18 months of political battles, courses in the ASECA curriculum can now be combined with courses from the formal school sector (and one technical course) in the composite certificate< /I>, and this is now available to all non-school institutions.