Chapter 5. Aligning Community Education and Training with local needs
To ensure that Community education and training is useful for participants, the training offer and content needs to reflect the needs of the community and the local labour market. The needs of communities can be diverse, and a holistic understanding of these needs can only be achieved when a variety of local stakeholders is engaged. This chapter presents ways to ensure that community education and training programmes are aligned with labour market needs, with a particular focus on the local stakeholders that should be involved in assessing these needs.
5.1. Background
For community education and training to have a useful impact on individuals’ lives, local employers and communities more broadly, the programmes and services offered at CET institutions need to be aligned with the needs of the community. Evidence from Asian community learning centres shows that in many countries, the planning and operations of these centres are influenced more by national policies and programmes than by localised planning and programme development. Key interventions that are found to improve relevance include knowing where job opportunities are and matching programmes to these opportunities, collaborative programmes where community learning centres cooperate with local stakeholders, and taking into account feedback from learners (Unesco, 2016[1]).
In many countries, the education system has become more decentralised, partly in an effort to become more responsive to local needs. Evidence from the PISA survey shows that school systems that grant more autonomy to schools to define and elaborate their curricula and assessments tend to perform better than systems that do not grant such autonomy, provided that accountability mechanisms are in place (OECD, 2013[2]). However, as pointed out by Dyer and Rose (2005[3]), the success of decentralisation depends on many factors, including whether the local educators have the necessary capacities and leadership skills, and available support from higher-level government. Decentralised governance may support diversity, innovation and competition, but the downside is that it can also create confusion for students in the face of multiple pathways, while employers may find engagement in multiple contexts too burdensome. There may also be duplication of tasks, such as curriculum design and quality assurance.
In the case of vocational programmes, alignment with industry needs can be ensured by allowing employers and organised labour to be involved in setting the content of programmes. However, their level of engagement is often highly variable. Sometimes formal mechanisms to involve industry are lacking or ineffective, for example because the industrial bodies involved are not representative or because their voice is weak compared to that of other stakeholders (e.g. education and training institutions, government bodies). Low levels of engagement result in programmes that lack relevance to the labour market and are not trusted by employers.
For education institutions to be responsive to local needs, they need to have a good understanding of what and where these needs are. As highlighted by Unesco (2014[4]), local communities are invaluable for identifying local priorities, so that real issues can be addressed. Schools must therefore have access to relevant local information, and need to have the skills to collect and analyse this information. According to OECD (2018[5]), for education systems to develop the skills that students need to thrive and shape their world, curricula have to be adaptable and dynamic so that they can be updated and aligned with societal requirements and individual learner needs. It is important to involve teachers, students and other relevant stakeholders early in the development of the curriculum, to ensure their ownership for implementation.
5.2. Flexibility in programme offering and content
One of the main goal of community education and training should be to improve the livelihoods of participants, by responding to their needs. This includes facilitating access to labour market opportunities, but also improving general knowledge and skills for day-to-day activities and problems. Therefore, for community education and training to have the desired impact, it should be responsive to the needs of the communities in which it is operational. Education and training systems that are truly responsive to local needs generally have some degree of flexibility in deciding on which courses to offer and on the content of training programmes. Countries are using a number of tools to allow for the local tailoring of course content, including: i) designating local time within the curriculum; ii) setting national curriculum frameworks to be operationalised locally; iii) national accreditation for locally designed curricula; and iv) modularisation (see Box 5.1). As an example, the professional programmes in Fachschulen in Germany are established centrally (by the Länder), but the individual institutions can determine around 20% of the curriculum (OECD, 2014[6]).
Giving training providers flexibility to determine (part of) the curricula of training programmes allows for more responsiveness to local skills needs. Different strategies are used to introduce flexibility in training programmes, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Some of the training programmes offered in CET institutions are general in nature, meaning that they respond to skill needs that cut across different communities. These general programmes include, for example, the literacy and second chance programmes. While the content of these programmes should be adapted to the target audience of adult learners, it can broadly be the same in all CET institutions across the country.
Similarly, some of the non-formal programmes, like employability and entrepreneurship programmes (see Chapter 3), target skill needs that can be observed across the country. However, it can be useful to adapt parts of these programmes to local realities, such as the prevailing industries and occupations in the local area. Entrepreneurship programmes in CET institutions that are located in areas where the informal sector plays an important role, could be focused partially on the particular realities and challenges related to operating an informal business and ways to progress into the formal sector. Employability programmes can also benefit from some degree of flexibility: in communities with a large share of economic activity in the hospitality sector, for example, the employability skills programme could devote more attention to social interaction skills. These types of programmes could therefore be configured as ‘partially flexible’: part of the programme is fixed (determined by the central level), and the other part allows for flexibility to respond to community needs. The flexible component of these programmes would also allow for inviting community members, like entrepreneurs or youth with successful career pathways, to share their insights in the skills that are important in working life. The Department for Higher Education and Training (DHET) could develop optional modules that can be used by the CET institutions.
Other programmes, like vocational and life skills programmes, would benefit from a large degree of flexibility, as these should be truly respond to the needs of the community. CET institutions should have the freedom to decide which programmes to offer, in consultation with community members. For the vocational skills programmes, CET institutions have the flexibility to combine different unit standards to create a programme that corresponds to the needs of local employers. To avoid a proliferation of vocational skill programmes and ensure that the course offering responds to real community needs, a system can be set up in which Community Learning Centres need to submit requests for opening specific programmes, justifying why there is a need, with the CET College Manager (i.e. the manager of the provincial administrative hub of the CET system). This system would only work if CET Colleges have the capacity to respond without significant delays to these requests. Similarly, CET institutions should be able to decide on the content and form of some non-formal programmes, like life skills programmes, adapted to the needs of the participants. However, the DHET should make general teaching materials available for a range of common topics related to life skills. This can be done in cooperation with other Departments and NGOs.
Recommended action steps
Table 5.2 provides some possible action steps that could be taken to introduce flexibility in the programme offering at CET institutions. For each action step, the most relevant stakeholders concerned are listed. The list of stakeholders is not exhaustive, and cooperation between different stakeholders is encouraged. The actions steps focus on the short- and medium-term, and a more ambitious action plan could be developed for the longer term in line with the vision for CET from the DHET’s strategic documents.
5.3. Using available skill needs information
The identification of skills needs is not a straightforward exercise, and usually involves a wide range of tools and stakeholders (OECD, 2016[8]). In South Africa, information on labour market needs is available from multiple actors, at different levels of disaggregation. As argued by OECD (2017[9]), the available information on labour market needs is not used extensively in South Africa. In most OECD countries, skills needs information is used by policy-makers in the areas of employment, education and training, and migration, but also by social partners. Nonetheless, there are many reasons why skill needs data are not used as much as they could be, including insufficient sharing of the results with key stakeholders and the wider public, results that are too technical and/or not sufficiently disaggregated, and the fact that policies related to tackling skill needs are scattered across government levels and agencies (OECD, 2016[8]).
In South Africa, comprehensive skill needs exercises exist at different levels of disaggregation:
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National level: At the national level, the DHET produces every other year a list of occupations in high demand using both quantitative and qualitative information. In addition, the OECD’s Skills for Jobs database provides information on the skills that are in shortage and surplus in South Africa’s labour market. While these national level data might be too general to decide on training needs at the community level, they do provide relevant background information on the type of skills that are important in today’s and tomorrow’s labour market.
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Sector level: Part of the mandate of the SETAs is to determine skill needs in their respective sectors. Using information from employers in their sectors, SETAs annually produce sector skills plans, which contain information on the skills most in demand or shortage in the sector. This information is used to prioritise funding under the skills development levy system. The sector skills plans can help communities understand the skill needs of the main sectors in their local area. Moreover, SETAs could use the information gathered from employers to look at needs at the regional or local level.
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Municipal level: South African municipalities use integrated strategic planning to plan their future development. In cooperation with local stakeholders, municipalities develop 5-year integrated development plans, which can be revised annually. The first stage of the development of such a plan is the identification of community needs. These needs guide the development of a vision, objectives, strategies, and –ultimately- projects. It is recommended that municipalities set up a Representative Forum to facilitate and encourage the participation of local stakeholders. The Integrated Development Plans could provide valuable information on local needs to CET institutions.
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Infrastructure project level: Large public infrastructure projects create skill needs in specific regions or sectors. The DHET developed a tool to anticipate skill needs related to these infrastructure projects and find and/or train the necessary workers (OECD, 2017[9]). One of the steps in the tool is to consider schools in the local area to deliver the necessary training. When CET is truly responsive to local labour market needs, it could be the ideal provider of some of the training needed for the infrastructure projects.
A data source that is not used extensively in South Africa to analyse labour market needs is information from vacancies.1 In many countries, vacancy data are used to analyse which skills and occupations are in demand in the labour market. In some countries, the number of vacancies is compared to the number of job seeker to calculate pressure on the labour market. In South Africa, the Department of Labour collects information on vacancies from newspapers for their annual report on job opportunities and unemployment, to understand the trends in demand for each occupation and industry. Private firms also provide information on vacancies in South Africa. CareerJunction, a platform for matching job seekers and vacancies, for example, publishes monthly reports on the evolution of demand and supply, highlighting the skills and occupations with the strongest demand. South Africa also has a public employment service, Employment Services South Africa (ESSA), which has a database of registered job seekers and vacancies. The information from vacancy data could be used to better understand demand in the local labour market. While data is generally disseminated at the national level, more disaggregate information could be made available for CET colleges and learning centres. At an international level, the use of web-scraping technologies to analyse online vacancies is becoming increasingly popular, as it allows getting real-time detailed information on available vacancies and their content. Such an analysis can be complementary to other vacancy collection exercises (e.g. from printed media), especially when the share of vacancies posted online is limited.
Recommended action steps
Table 5.3 provides some possible action steps that could be taken to collect and use skill needs information. For each action step, the most relevant stakeholders concerned are listed. The list of stakeholders is not exhaustive, and cooperation between different stakeholders is encouraged. The actions steps focus on the short- and medium-term, and a more ambitious action plan could be developed for the longer term in line with the vision for CET from the DHET’s strategic documents.
5.4. Involving key local stakeholders
In addition to consulting existing information on skill needs, the CET system should gather inputs directly from relevant local stakeholders. These stakeholders can help identifying key areas of skill needs, but also help in designing training programmes. At the same time, the involvement of local stakeholders can help create a positive image of CET and a sense of ownership throughout the community. Lolwana, Rabe and Morakane (2018[10]) identify the lack of meaningful relationships with other education institutions and the labour market, and therefore the inability to help students develop effective learning pathways, as the number one weakness of the current CET system. Different stakeholders can provide insights on different types of needs:
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Local labour market needs: Local employers can give insights in the labour market needs in the local area. Firms can provide information on existing and planned vacancies, as well as the skill gaps observed among their current employees and job seekers more generally. Firms, and especially smaller ones, can also provide insights into entrepreneurial opportunities, and the skills needed to start a business. In this respect, firms from the informal sector should also be included in the consultation process. Strong ties with local employers could also be used to negotiate workplace-learning opportunities for CET students and graduates (e.g. internships). Similarly, SETAs are also well connected with local employers, and can assist CET institutions in engaging with them.
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Social development needs: NGOs often have close ties with the local communities, and can therefore provide valuable information on the needs of these communities. This information is not limited to labour market needs, but also relates to broader social development needs. Similarly, community leaders can have a good understanding of local needs. CET institutions can also set up partnerships with NGOs that already provide training opportunities for adults, to facilitate and encourage cooperation. Other government departments, such as social development, health and rural development can also provide useful insights into community needs.
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Skills needs for further education: The goal of the CET system is not only to prepare adults for the labour market, but also to facilitate the transition to TVET colleges and higher education institutions. Close relationships between CET institutions and TVET colleges and universities in the same area will allow for a better understanding of the skills needed to progress into these education institutions, and their training offer. Partnerships between CET institutions and other training providers can be set up to ensure that CET graduates get access to further education opportunities. Partnerships can also be formed to share resources (e.g. CET using the infrastructure of public or private TVET colleges for vocational programmes).
In addition, local government could also provide insights into the broad needs of communities, in addition to the needs identified in their Integrated Development Plans. Local governments generally have a good understanding of the problems in their area, and have close connections with key local stakeholders. At the same time, local governments often provide or finance training opportunities for adults, and close cooperation with them is therefore crucial to understand their training offer, but also to encourage them to finance training programmes in CET institutions.
Different strategies can be pursued to engage with local stakeholders. CET institutions can, for example, set up regular meetings with stakeholders, create a consultative body, appoint stakeholders to their governing board and/or enter into close partnership with certain key stakeholders. Box 5.2 describes how local community members are engaged in Canada and the United States. Sufficient capacity is needed in the CET system to set up and manage stakeholder engagements and partnerships.
Recommended action steps
Table 5.4 provides some possible action steps that could be taken to engage local stakeholders in the CET system. For each action step, the most relevant stakeholders concerned are listed. The list of stakeholders is not exhaustive, and cooperation between different stakeholders is encouraged. The actions steps focus on the short- and medium-term, and a more ambitious action plan could be developed for the longer term in line with the vision for CET from the DHET’s strategic documents.
5.5. Taking outcomes and feedback into account
In order to know if CET programmes are truly aligned with local needs, it is important to understand whether they had the desired impact on the participants and local stakeholders. These outcomes can be measured through satisfaction surveys, but also by tracking students after graduation. The current information system in CET is very weak, making it very difficult to measure the effectiveness of CET programmes and services (Lolwana, Rabe and Morakane, 2018[10]).
The main goal of vocational skills programmes in CET institutions is to improve the labour market prospects of participants by equipping them with skills that are in demand in the local labour market. For these programmes to be successful, they need to give graduates access to employment opportunities and provide a pool of well-trained candidates to local employers with recruitment needs. The positive outcomes can be measured through satisfaction surveys among participants and employers. Participants can be asked whether they were satisfied with the programme and whether it had a positive impact on their labour market outcomes. Similarly, employers who hired graduates can be asked about their satisfaction with the skill of the new recruits. Box 5.3 describes how Denmark collects and disseminates information from satisfaction surveys. An alternative and more objective way to measure outcomes is through the collection of information on employment rates of participants and rates of progress into further education. This information can be collected through tracer surveys, but also by setting up integrated information systems that link data on education enrolment and graduation with labour market information systems (e.g. unemployment insurance contributions).
Canada: Community members on governing boards of colleges
In Canada, most public colleges have community members on their governing boards. These boards are semi-autonomous, meaning that they must follow government policies and directives, but are free to implement them in a way that best suits their local community’s realities. The community members include local employers, local community groups and local government. Governing board members generally act on a voluntary basis, i.e. without any compensation for their activities. The role of the business community is not limited to participation in governing boards, as local employers are often also members of committees that advise on course offering and curricula.
United States: Partnerships between community colleges and businesses
Many community colleges in the United States have formed partnerships with local employers to address labour market needs in their region. In many cases, employers from the same sector team up to co-operate with community colleges to develop and implement training programmes that address skill needs in their sector. In Sacramento, for example, community colleges and utilities have worked together to create programmes that develop skills for entry-level utility occupations in the region. In San Diego, local clean technology companies partnered with community colleges to design training programmes to prepare high-skilled workers for careers in the bio-fuels sector. The advantage for community colleges of forming a partnership with a group of employers rather than with one single employer is that the co-developed training programmes will not be employer-specific, allowing graduates to be more flexible and access a wider range of job opportunities in the labour market.
Source: Asian Development Bank (2015[11]), Brennan (2014[12]), Collaborative Economics (2015[13]).
In the same vein, the effectiveness of second chance programmes can be measured by looking at the share of graduates that continued to further education and the employment rate of those who do not pursue further education opportunities. For non-formal training and learning programmes, the outcomes are often less directly linked to the labour market or further education, and their impact can therefore mainly be measured through satisfaction surveys. The same holds for other services provided in CET institutions, such as career guidance and RPL support.
Training providers around the world are increasingly being assessed based on the outcomes of their students. In many OECD countries, quality assessment and certification of training providers takes into account the labour market outcomes and user satisfaction of training participants (OECD, 2019[14]). Chapter 6 provides more details on how to use the information on outcomes for quality assurance.
The Danish Ministry of Education introduced a nationwide online tool for measuring the quality of vocational education and training. The purpose of the tool is to measure the satisfaction of participants, as well as their learning outcomes, but also the satisfaction of enterprises whose employees have participated in vocational training. It is a flexible tool that offers the possibility of inserting optional questions at regional and local levels to measure other aspects of interest to parties such as providers and regional councils. The use of the tool is compulsory for training providers.
Participants are asked questions on the usefulness of training, but also the satisfaction with teachers and the form and content teaching. Certain questions directly ask about the usefulness of training for employment opportunities. The unemployed are asked whether training helped them access better opportunities to find a job. Questions for the employed refer to the use of the newly acquired skills in the workplace and to whether or not the training enabled them to carry out new tasks in their current job.
The data are shared with the broad public on a website (www.viskvalitet.dk) to help students and adults make informed education and training choices. This also provides an incentive to training providers to invest in the quality of their programmes. Ratings are made available as soon as a minimum number of answers have been received.
Source: Cedefop (2011[15]); Bolvig, Kiil and Kristensen (2015[16]); Zibrowius (2018[17]).
Recommended action steps
Table 5.5 provides some possible action steps that could be taken to collect feedback and information on outcomes from CET students. For each action step, the most relevant stakeholders concerned are listed. The list of stakeholders is not exhaustive, and cooperation between different stakeholders is encouraged. The actions steps focus on the short- and medium-term, and a more ambitious action plan could be developed for the longer term in line with the vision for CET from the DHET’s strategic documents.
References
[11] Asian Development Bank (2015), The role of community colleges in skills development: Lessons from the Canadian experience for developing Asia, Asian Development Bank, https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/177058/role-community-colleges-skills-development.pdf (accessed on 4 June 2018).
[16] Bolvig, I., A. Kiil and N. Kristensen (2015), Videreudvikling af Vis Kvalitet, Kora, Kopenhagen.
[12] Brennan, P. (2014), “Raising the quality and image of TVET: Lower-level training or motor for inclusive and sustainable growth?”, PROSPECTS, Vol. 44/2, pp. 183-195, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11125-014-9312-3.
[15] Cedefop (2011), “Assuring quality in vocational education and training: The role of accrediting VET providers”, Cedefop Reference series, No. 90, Cedefop.
[13] Collaborative Economics (2015), Next Generation Industry Engagement: Toward a Shared Investment Approach to High-Demand Workforce Training, The Morgan Family Foundation, http://doingwhatmatters.cccco.edu/portals/6/docs/SW/MorganProfiles_2015.pdf (accessed on 4 June 2018).
[3] Dyer, C. and P. Rose (2005), “Decentralisation for educational development? An editorial introduction”, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, Vol. 35/2, pp. 105-113, https://doi.org/10.1080/03057920500129809.
[10] Lolwana, P., E. Rabe and M. Morakane (2018), “Who accesses adult education and where do they progress to? An exploratory tracer study in community education and training”, LMIP reports, No. 37, Labour Market Intelligence Parternship, http://www.lmip.org.za/document/who-accesses-adult-education-and-where-do-they-progress-exploratory-tracer-study-community (accessed on 7 November 2018).
[14] OECD (2019), Getting Skills Right: Future-Ready Adult Learning Systems, Getting Skills Right, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264311756-en.
[5] OECD (2018), The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030, OECD, Paris, https://www.oecd.org/education/2030/E2030%20Position%20Paper%20(05.04.2018).pdf (accessed on 7 August 2018).
[9] OECD (2017), Getting Skills Right: South Africa, Getting Skills Right, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264278745-en.
[8] OECD (2016), Getting Skills Right: Assessing and Anticipating Changing Skill Needs, Getting Skills Right, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264252073-en.
[7] OECD (2016), Job Creation and Local Economic Development 2016, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264261976-en.
[6] OECD (2014), Skills beyond School: Synthesis Report, OECD Reviews of Vocational Education and Training, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264214682-en.
[2] OECD (2013), PISA 2012 Results: What Makes Schools Successful (Volume IV): Resources, Policies and Practices, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264201156-en.
[18] Reddy, V. et al. (2017), Occupations in High Demand in South Africa - A Technical Report, LMIP.
[1] Unesco (2016), Community-based lifelong learning and adult education: Situations of community learning centres in 7 Asian countries, Unesco, Bangkok.
[4] Unesco (2014), Education microplanning toolkit: introductory module, Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education, Bangkok, http://www.unesco.org/open-access/terms-use-ccbysa-en (accessed on 7 August 2018).
[17] Zibrowius, M. (2018), Promoting Social Partnership in Employee Training: EU Social Partners’ Project on Employee Training - Country Report Denmark, German Economic Institute, Cologne, https://www.etuc.org/sites/default/files/publication/file/2018-06/DK_Country%20report%20Denmark_final.pdf (accessed on 10 July 2018).
Note
← 1. Information on vacancies is one of the components used by the DHET to calculate the occupations in high demand (Reddy et al., 2017[18]).