accountable to the needs of labour market, its staff complement should be appropriately qualified. The quality of the sector staff complement is essential to enable the sector to fulfill its mandate.
2.5.10 Articulation of curricula and course content to the skills needs of labour markets
The aforementioned contentions contribute to the problem raised by critics of the sector in earlier arguments (see paragraph 1.2). The failure to appoint appropriately qualified personnel despite being mandated by the FET College Act, 2006 to do so is evidence of the sector‟s failure to reform. The failure of some colleges to account for funds allocated to them strengthens the assumption that consumables and equipment meant for Integrated Summative Assessment (ISAT) were never purchased and as a result students were compromised. Further, it is very important for the public FET college sector to develop strong and formal relations with labour markets to enable the sector to understand the needs of labour markets.
An understanding of what the labour market needs in terms of skills will enable the sector to appropriately align and articulate curricula to the needs of commerce and industry. However, the needs of labour markets are determined by the aspirations and demands of their client base. The needs and demands of clients and consumers keep changing due to the complexity and dynamics of global markets. The inflexibility of the public FET college sector might compromise its
students by facilitating skills development programmes which are outdated and irrelevant to labour markets.
To keep up with the pace at which labour market skills demands are changing, the public FET college sector should be flexible and responsive to the changes. If the public FET college sector is to remain responsive and accountable to the skills needs of labour markets, it should be flexible and keep abreast with the latest developments in the labour market landscape through positive and strong relations with commerce and industry. The Green Paper for Post School Education and Training outlines the dearth of a healthy relationship between colleges and labour markets as follows:
There is inadequate information about labour market needs and future growth possibilities. This makes planning and targeting of provision difficult. Articulation with labour market has two elements. Firstly, it is about matching the supply of and demand for skills in this market. Secondly it is about developing better links between education institutions and industry to create further opportunities for apprenticeships, learnerships, work experience and training. At present, statistical information on labour market demands remains thin and lacks uniformity across the different SETAs responsible for gathering this information. Central coordination of such data is also inadequate (Department of Higher Education and Training, 2012a: 14).
In terms of the aforementioned a formal relationship between colleges and labour markets is lacking which compromises the responsiveness,
articulation and accountability of the sector to the skills needs of labour markets. The aforementioned arguments as advanced by the Green Paper for Post School Education and Training suggest that articulation of the public FET college sector curricula and course content is unlikely to be achieved. The curricula and course contents of the public FET college sector should be informed by the skills needs of labour markets.
Thus, the difficulty of achieving responsiveness, accountability and articulation by the public FET college sector can also be attributed to the lack of a formal relationship with labour markets. According to the abovementioned argument, the public FET college sector is functioning in isolation from commerce and industry and do not understand the aspirations of commerce and industry and the skills in demand in the labour market landscape. The lack of a formal relationship between the public FET colleges and the labour market is likely to impact negatively on the graduates of these colleges. Their employment opportunities might be affected because the skills and knowledge that the colleges impart to them are irrelevant to labour markets. Nzimande in his address to the Kwa Zulu Natal inter-cluster forum on 3 August 2011 outlined the lack of articulation between the public FET college sector‟s curricula and labour markets as follows:
A few years ago SASOL (Suid Afrikaanse Steenkool Olie) imported a particular type welders because we were not producing this particular type of skill in the country. This year the Medupi project requires the same type of welders, we are still not producing these welders. The project is then left with no option but to import these skills. Do we have capacity in our
colleges to teach these specialized skills? (Nzimande, 2011a)
Nzimande concurs with the Green Paper for Post School Education and Training in identifying a misalignment between the curricula of the public FET college sector and the skills demanded by the labour markets. Moreover, the Green Paper for Post School Education and Training published in 2012 cites articulation of the public FET college sector‟s curriculum to the needs of labour markets as a challenge. According to Akoojee (2009: 132), when the NC (V) was introduced in 2007, it was hailed as a curriculum that articulated to the skills needs of labour markets. However, Nzimande‟s comments in 2011 and the Green Paper for Post School Education and Training in 2012 suggest that the NCV is not as effective as supposed. The pronouncement of the NCV as a curriculum articulated to needs of labour markets is outlined as follows:
In 2006 the National department undertook a radical revision of the curriculum, replacing the traditional NATED with the NCV. It was pointed out by the government that these programmes were designed with the intent of more closely aligning with the needs of business and labour in order to cohere more effectively with the economic needs of the country. The new curriculum was hailed as a long awaited response to the national skills crisis (Akoojee, 2009:132).
In terms of the aforementioned argument as advanced by Akoojee, the NCV was introduced in 2007 to address the lack of articulation to the skills needs of labour markets within the public FET college sector.
However, Nzimande (2011) questions the government pronouncement made in 2006 that the NCV is articulated to the skills needs of labour markets and this is supported by the evaluation made by the Green Paper for Post School Education and Training (2012). This suggests that although the post 1994 public FET college sector is receiving support at the highest political level, this has failed to yield anticipated positive result particularly with regard to the articulation of the curricula to the skills need of commerce and industry.