Chapter Three

Open Learning and ABET 

 Introduction 

Changes to the South African education and training systems since 1994 have included the conceptualizing and enshrinement in law of a National Qualifications Framework (NQF), which is divided into a number of levels at which qualifications will be placed. Level One of the NQF is that of General Education and Training and includes within itself early childhood education, schooling (from reception year to grade nine) and adult basic education and training (from ABET levels one to four). 

Examining open learning in relation to General Education and Training for adult learners in the sub-field (or sub-fields) of adult basic education[1] and training is beset with many of the same definitional problems found when looking at open learning more broadly within the whole field of education, training and development.

 Open learning principles and their applicability to ABET 

ABET Policy and Open Learning Principles

The national Department of Education’s Policy Document on Adult Basic Education and Training of October 1997 declares that an open learning approach is the foundation of good practice in all Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET). The document states (Department of Education, 1997a, pp. 7-8): 2.2.2 Principles of Good Education Practice The Department of Education has interpreted the constitutional guarantee to basic education in terms of an open learning approach. In this regard, it cites the following principles of good educational practice which should inform all initiatives in ABET:

•    Learner centredness;

•    Lifelong learning;

•    Flexibility of learning provision;

•    The removal of barriers to access learning;

•    The recognition of prior learning and experience;

•    The provision of learner support; and

•    The maintenance of rigorous quality assurance over the design of learning materials and support systems.

These principles have been examined in Chapter One in some detail but will be re-examined here to see how well they are reflected in theory and practice in the ABET sector. 

There is very limited South African literature that provides an overview of evidence on the actual practice and implementation of ABET. This is hardly surprising as, in a formal sense, ABET has only existed as a system or proto-system for five years. The reader is therefore largely restricted to a number of studies emanating from the University of Natal (Harley et al, 1996; Aitchison, 1998, 1999; Aitchison and Houghton et al, 1999, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, Aitchison et al, 2000; Houghton and Aitchison et al, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c, 1999, 1999), a couple of reviews by other academics (for example, Castle, 1999; Vähämäki, 1999) and a number of specific project or campaign reviews or evaluations (for example, French, 1997; Department of Adult and Community Education and Centre for Adult Education, 1998; Continuing Education Programme, 1998; University of Natal, 1999). 

The implementation of ABET in the context of developments in the broader framework are well expressed in the following quotation from Harbans Bhola (1997). Bhola is an international expert on literacy and basic education who was a consultant to the task team writing the national Department of Education’ s A National Multi-year implementation plan for Adult Education and Training: Provision and Accreditation (1997b):

The new constitution of South Africa promises basic education for all including adults. In practice, however, adult basic education has come to be narrowly construed. Adult Basic Education has indeed become ABET: Adult Basic Education and Training. It has become education for economic skills. This definition of ABET is explained and expounded in the National Government’s Department of Education’s Interim Guidelines published in 1995. The Guidelines demand that the skills taught and learned should be testable, certifiable, and portable and that there should be recognition of prior learning. 

In practice, ABET by focussing almost exclusively on the ‘T’ (i.e., Training) of labour for the formal economy has squeezed out of adult basic education the needs of the multitudes not in the formal economy. In addition, education for democratization of communities and institutions is completely sidelined. 

It is sadly ironic that the training component in ABET is not being handled very well either. A considerable level of effort and national resources are being allocated to establishing standards, listing outcomes and developing tests, forgetting that tests howsoever generalized and standardized do assume the existence of teaching materials, and that learning outcomes come out of the content of curriculum embedded in teaching materials. The almost complete lack of relevant and rich teaching-learning materials is hard to understand. 

There may also be a lack of understanding of the institutional and political processes involved in the transition from learning to working. Portable skills are of no use if there is no port of entry into the labour market. Given these conditions, the ABET program may collapse under its own weight of formalism and routine – isolated from the realities of life in South Africa of today.

 Learner-centredness 

To what extent does current provision of ABET ensure that the learner is an active participant in an educational process which is itself driven by the learner’s needs, possibilities, experience, contexts and situations? The answer is, not as much as might be hoped, though such a judgement must be immediately qualified by stating that general or basic education, precisely because of its foundational and generic nature, is usually not particularly amenable to the specific needs, experience, and contexts of individual learners (as was noted in our analysis of open learning principles in chapter two). A national decision that all the citizens of a country should be literate and educated must necessarily operate at a high level of generality. The whole apparatus of the NQF, with its setting up of standards for particular qualifications enhances this move towards the general, for standards have to be expressed in terms of a nationally agreed framework and internationally acceptable outcomes. 

ABET learners are not active participants in outcomes selection and standards setting except in the tenuous sense that certain ‘stakeholders’ claim to be the representatives of learners (such as organized labour) or professionally accountable to them (organized educators). At the implementation (classroom) level, an outcomes-based system in theory allows for enormous curricular freedom. As long as the outcomes are reached and the standards met, anything that works is all right. However, this freedom, like most freedoms, comes at a cost, for it requires considerable competence by both learners and teachers in the handling of educational processes. In reality, this is not the case, and there is evidence that, in most current ABET practice, either the most traditional of educational practices dominate or educators mechanically teach to the outcomes/standards. 

By comparison, a small literacy class in the mid-eighties run by a left wing non-governmental organization, informed as it was by the methods advocated by Paulo Freire, would have attempted to develop a literacy curriculum interactively, based on the ‘generative themes’ that arose out of the particular life situation and concerns of learners.^[2] 

‘Learner centredness’ is one of the articles of faith in outcomes-based education (OBE) policy that is associated with the national Department of Education’s Curriculum 2005 for schools. It is possible that the gradual re-training of South Africa’s school teachers (and most ABET instruction is done by practising or former school teachers) may indeed lead to a more learner centred approach. This is particularly so because the national Department of Education’s training materials on OBE consistently conflate OBE with a variety of desirable teaching methods.^[3]

 Lifelong learning 

Lifelong learning (in the sense that all people learn throughout life and that this reality should be affirmed, capitalized upon, and enhanced) is a contested concept. Within the field of adult education, its definitions range from a utopian ideal to rigid forms of compulsory continuing education. The National Education Policy Investigation report on Adult Education (1993, p. 9) states this of the more utopian view:

Although apparently similar to continuing education, lifelong education is a more comprehensive and visionary concept which includes formal, non-formal and informal learning extended throughout the lifespan of an individual to attain the fullest possible development in personal, social and professional life. It views education in its totality, and includes learning that occurs in the home, school, community, and workplace, and through mass media and other situations and structures for acquiring and enhancing enlightenment. 

Clearly, viewed in this way, lifelong education has strong communal and cooperative elements and little in common with a schooling mode of thought. But it remains at present a visionary call for an open learning society, operating through a multiplicity of educational networks. The work of Ivan Illich on ‘deschooling society’ has informed much thought in this area, though it needs to be noted that Illich and Verne (1976) and the Centre for Intercultural Documentation (1974) have delivered powerful critiques of ‘lifelong learning’ when understood as lifelong mandatory continuing education. They see this as mainly serving the interests of educational institutions. In looking at any system of ‘lifelong learning’, the possibility always has to be included of it being more a form of slavery than liberation. 

Current ABET policies and practices, in spite of much rhetoric about lifelong learning, have focused on efforts to differentiate ABET from school-type structures. Nevertheless, it will remain critical to ensure that the system does not lock into complicated and heavily structured programmes and qualifications that approximate those already entrenched in schooling.

Flexibility

Flexibility in what is to be learned, how it is learned, and when it is learned without compromising the possibility of constructing recognized qualifications that provide proof of learning is officially endorsed in official ABET policy documents. 

Openness and flexibility are associated in the Policy Document on Adult Basic Education and Training with the absence of a core curriculum (Department of Education, 1997a, p. 24): No core curriculum or syllabus will be provided by the Department of Education for the ABET learning areas or the broader organizing fields...This is an important change from past practice where syllabuses and national core curriculum guidelines laid down what should be taught and how it should be taught. In an outcomes-based approach the focus is on the outcomes of learning. 

How the learner reaches these outcomes, and by what particular curriculum, is now open and flexible. The actual curriculum the learner can follow to attain the outcomes will be left to the initiative and creativity of curriculum developers, materials developers, providers and learners. Another section of the policy document, which speaks of the national curriculum framework, again emphasizes openness (Department of Education, 1997a, p. 26): 5.9 Expectations of the impact of the national curriculum framework on ABET

It is hoped that with respect to adult learners the broad national curriculum framework will... be open and flexible, so that learning programmes can integrate learning area content and outcomes with varying degrees of specificity depending on needs and contexts;...However, educational transformation does not necessarily play out as envisaged in policy frameworks, and old ideas of a prescribed core curriculum are still prevalent. Where these ideas are still most strongly in prevalence, they have tended to recur largely through the wording of unit standards, specific outcomes, and assessment criteria.[4] Prescribed curricula dominate when educational authorities presume they know what learners need, and prescribe this through curriculum frameworks to educators. The Department of Education publication, Learning Programme Guidelines for ABET (Department of Education, 1999, p. 17) has a passage in which programme developers and teachers are given guidance on the need to recognize that there is more to curriculum development than merely meeting the felt and expressed needs of learners - they need to provide educational leadership by engaging in a process of needs negotiation, so that adult learners can perceive and internalise some new learning needs as well. Accepting the ‘felt needs’ rationale, without further enquiry and negotiation of learning needs, means that the educator/facilitator has abandoned responsibility for the learning process and the achievement of learning outcomes. 

What ABET learners apparently need to know is embodied in current proposals for the General Education and Training Certificate (GETC) to be awarded when the learner has gained 120 credits (equivalent to 1200 notional study hours, including contact sessions, assignments, tests and examinations, private study), which in practical terms is equivalent to one year of full-time study. These credits must be obtained from a number of learning areas according to certain rules (Sector document proposed by the Interim ABET Advisory Body), No date [1999], pp. 1:18-1:26): 

Proposal for structure of unit standards based GETC
Category of learning	Learning area	Credits
Fundamental	Language, literacy and communication	20 @ NQF level 1
	Mathematical literacy, mathematics and mathematical sciences	16 @ NQF level 1
Core	Natural sciences	54 credits gained in at least 4 of these learning areas   36 credits must be @ NQF level 1   18 credits can be at a higher or lower level but must not duplicate any of the 36 credits @ NQF level 1
	Technology
	Human and Social sciences
	Economic and Management sciences
	Arts and Culture
	Life Orientation
Elective	From any learning field but must articulate with the core learning areas studied	30 credits @ NQF level 1 or higher
		120 credits
If a GETC requires bi-literacy credits, the additional language credits need not be at the level of qualification but may not be lower than ABET level 3.

These rules are complex, so that it is unlikely that the average functionally illiterate person would understand his or her ‘need’ for them without considerable instruction and guidance from the educator who has ‘responsibility for the learning process. Many educators themselves may also struggle to understand these rules. They make sense primarily in the context of highly formalized programmes that replicate primary schooling for children and, in this sense, are hardly ‘open’. A concern in this regard is that, unlike school children, for whom educational attendance is – theoretically – not a matter of choice, adults have to make choices about whether to engage and what to study. It is, therefore, critical to make governing frameworks as simple as possible, and flexible enough to allow adult educators to find innovative ways of attracting learners to their programmes.

Removing Unnecessary Barriers to Access

The removal of barriers – whether they be of irrelevant pre-qualifications or the usual ones of access, time and money – to participation in learning programmes are at the heart of open learning. In another section of the Policy Document on Adult Basic Education and Training, the issue of opening access is highlighted (Department of Education, 1997a, p. 10):

The principal responsibility for putting in place an ABET system lies with government. Thus, government has a responsibility to report to all South Africans on the achievements of ABET provision, especially in respect of the opening of access to ABET for all. Employers are responsible for ensuring access to ABET programmes for their employees and, preferably, for the communities from which employees are drawn.... 

Baatjes et al (1999, pp. 19-21) provide an interesting discussion of barriers to participation in ABET in the context of the new Minister of Education, Kader Asmal’s 27 June 1999 call to ‘break the back of illiteracy’ using volunteers in a campaign[5]. Baatjes et al note that many of these barriers to participation in the ABET sector would not only apply to the learners (who, being adults, are, unlike schoolchildren, essentially volunteers) but also to educators.

Literature on Barriers to Participation

There is an extensive foreign literature on barriers to participation by adult learners (Courtney, 1992) in North America and Europe. Published South African literature is scant apart from minor local studies such as van Heerden’s (1991).

Types of Barriers

Much literature attempts to categorize barriers into groups such as: physical and temporal; individual and social; and learning. A good example is Carp et al (1974), who divide barriers into situational, dispositional, and institutional, as shown in the summary in this table of their 1974 study: 

Perceived Barriers to Learning
Barriers	% of potential learners
Situational barriers Cost, including tuition, books, child care, and so on Not enough time Home responsibilities Job responsibilities No child care No transportation No place to study or practice Friends or family don’t like the idea	53 46 32 28 11  8  7  3
Institutional barriers Don’t want to go to school full-time Amount of time required to complete programme Courses aren’t scheduled when I can attend No information about offerings Strict attendance requirements Courses I want don’t seem to be available Too much red tape in getting enrolled Don’t meet requirements to begin programme No way to get credit or a degree	35 21 16 16 15 12 10  6  5
Dispositional barriers Afraid that I’m too old to begin Low grades in past, not confident of my ability Not enough energy and stamina Don’t enjoy studying Tired of school, tired of classrooms Don’t know what to learn or what it would lead to Hesitate to seem too ambitious	17 12  9  9  6  5  3
Potential learners are those who indicated a desire to learn but who are not currently engaged in organized instruction.
Based on: Carp, A., Peterson, R., and Roelfs, P. 1974. Adult learning interests and experiences. In: K. P. Cross, J. R. Valley, and Associates 1974. Planning non-traditional programs: an analysis of the issues for post secondary education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

A more recent United States of America report on the 1991 National Household Education Survey (National Centre for Education Statistics, 1998, p. 43) shows the following barriers reported by participants: 

Barrier	%
	All	Male	Female
Meeting times	35.5	36.0	35.0
Cost	33.5	28.5	37.6
Location	21.9	20.6	23.0
Child care	6.1	4.7	7.4
Family responsibilities	29.8	24.8	34.0
Lack of Information	15.6	17.4	14.0
Classes of interest not offered	19.3	19.1	19.4
Other	1.7	2.0	1.4

 Nature of the barriers 

Geographical

Restrictions on, or lack of availability of, sites where education or the resources for education can be (easily) accessed are a major barrier. The problems of lack of transport and unsuitable locations (particularly at night) are obvious. In South Africa, frequent non-availability of public transport and dangers from criminals are serious barriers to participation, particularly of women. The DoE Adult Education Directorate notes that 49% of public ALCs operate during the day, 46% at night and 5% during the day and night, suggesting that factors such as these, amongst others, severely impinge of the capacity of such centres to operate during hours that are suitable to working adults. Van Heerden (1991, p. 26) has an instructive discussion of what she found when she interviewed learners in night schools and other learning centres:

The logistics of getting to a class always emerged as the main problem. All the learners interviewed talked about transport problems and costs, the dangers of being out at night, and money problems. 

The location of non-formal education centres emerged as a crucial factor in learner participation and cannot be overemphasised. The distance of educational centres from where participants lived was regarded as the main hindrance to participation. It was never said during the interviews that other people were not interested in education, but that they could not get to class. Transport was usually very expensive.... Many learners slept in town when they attended classes and those at Centres of Concern relied on their employers for transport. 

Related to transport problems were safety factors. Learners did not only talk about the dangers of being robbed or assaulted on their way home, but that children were left alone at night, and that an unattended house was more likely to be robbed or burned down....

It became obvious that location of education, transport facilities and costs, the dangers of being out late at night, and the violent circumstances participants endure will be crucial considerations in the planning of any non-formal initiatives. 

State ABET delivery takes place at public Adult Learning Centres (ALCs) (previously known as the ‘night schools’), usually run after school hours in public school premises by part-time teachers, still mainly recruited from the ranks of full-time school teachers (even though provincial and SADTU policies indicate that this is no longer allowed). In theory, public ALCs are near to people’s homes and accessible (DoE Adult Education Directorate information indicates that 87% of public ALCS are within 5km of users and only 5% are more than 10km from most users). Money has been spent on educators’ salaries in public ALCs and, indeed there have been substantial increases in some provincial budgets for adult education since 1997. On average, expenditure as a proportion of the provincial education budgets has increased from 0.56% from 1991/2 to 1995/96 to 0.8% in 1998/99. Nevertheless, the dominant impression is of a system that (with some provincial exceptions) does not yet deliver at just about every level: management, planning, innovation, monitoring and evaluation, and, above all, delivery to adult learners (Aitchison et al, 2000, pp. 29-43). In spite of claims of expansion in student numbers, it is clear that the number of public ALCs is on the decrease. Thus, for example, Kwazulu Natal, which has a large proportion of South Africa’s undereducated adults, reduced the number of its public ALCs from 366 in 1997 to 270 in 1998, and the number of staff serving them from 4029 to 1894 in the same period. Some of this reduction was linked to rationalization of the system (where, for example, two centres existed to serve the same community), but the fundamental reason for the reduction was lack of money and resources. Apart from reduction in the number of sites that provide ABET service, public ALCs have been closed for lengthy periods in some provinces (Eastern Cape, Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga) because of financial crises in these provinces in late 1997 and early 1998. At the same time, Further Education and Training classes, which used to be provided at public ALCs (and which would show that there was a learning pathway beyond ABET), are being phased out in many provinces, largely for financial reasons and rationalization of budgetary allocations) There is, however, not yet a specific budget for ABET as distinct from FET as far as ALCs are concerned. 

Geographical distance is not usually a problem in industry-based ABET provision or in classes provided to employees in a number of government departments, although these sites tend to cater largely for men. 

Time

The times available for instruction or learning may be unsuitable for certain categories of learners, and may exacerbate problems caused by other barriers such as geographical distance and safety. All day or week long workshops are difficult for workers who may have to sacrifice holiday time to attend. Mothers with small children have particular problems with timetables and lack of childcare facilities. Late afternoon or early evening classes may be impossible for women from homes where there is a demand that they prepare food and engage in childcare at these times. After-shift classes for workers are also hardly ideal. Safety issues often relate to the time when courses or resources are available to learners. 

Pace

This time-related factor can be a barrier when the pace is too fast. Thus, for example, women who are both in employment and expected to take major responsibility for home and childcare may have very little time to study and be unable to keep up. Likewise, pace can also be a barrier when the pace is too slow. The length of many programmes and courses is also a problem for many people (it may take years for an ABET learner to gain a General Certificate of Education).^[6] 

Individual and Social Characteristics of Learners

These range from the truly individual (age, sex, intelligence) to the more social and cultural (gender, ethnicity, class, wealth). 

Sex and Gender

There is a strong international trend for women to increase their participation in adult education, compared to a much smaller increase for men. Historically women have been greater partakers of non job-related adult education but they are now also surpassed men in the number of job-related courses taken. However, women have three major barriers to surmount:

•       A generally lower educational level than men (as is clearly evident in the South African figures though not nearly as pronounced in many developing countries);

•       More concern over cost (they are more likely to have to pay for themselves and receive less funding from employers, and may feel guilty about spending ‘family’ money as such costs are not seen as an investment in a career as it would be for men);

•       Continued social expectations that women are responsible for most domestic chores and childcare.

Current data on participation in ABET in South Africa suggests that, though men may dominate participation in industry-based ABET, women outnumber men in state public Adult Learning Centres[7] and in NGO run-classes. 

Age

Older adults often believe that it is more difficult to learn as one gets older. Young people who have had ‘free’ education are unwilling to pay for adult education, which they see as a ‘right’. Older people, unused to ‘free’ education, are more willing to pay. 

Employment

Workers have less money, larger families to support, and their employers are less likely to pay for them or give them leave.

Dispositional Barriers

Psycho-social and attitudinal barriers – the beliefs, attitudes and perceptions that inhibit participation – are often underestimated. Potential learners often do not speak about them for fear of hurting their self-image or that of their instructors. Learning is considered by society to be desirable, and therefore non-participating adults do not want to appear stupid or uninterested in learning. Wilcox, Saltford and Veres (1975) found in their survey that only 2% ascribed their non-participation as due to lack of interest, but 26% said that others’ lack of participation was caused by lack of interest. Van Heerden’s Pietermaritzburg study (1991, p. 26) found the fear of ridicule a powerful disincentive to participation in literacy or ABET classes:

The embarrassment of being an adult learner and the notion that people would laugh at an adult going to school was often quoted as a problem. Also mentioned was a fear of appearing foolish in front of others in the class. The shame of admitting illiteracy was frequently cited as a problem in the Indian community. 

Learners often felt that young people were more likely to laugh at them than older people, but that their own children and families were very supportive. The idea that neighbours would also joke about adults going to school was also repeated several times. Older people did not seem to mind having a young adult teacher, but did not want to sit next to children in school.

Attitudes about education moulded by negative school experiences or the opinions of reference groups may lead to a rejection of the usefulness, appropriateness (especially for mature men), pleasurability, and intrinsic value of adult education. Adult learners recall the experience of being alienated from the culture of the school because of some combination of personal attributes, family circumstances, and existing school norms and structures. They may recall schools as places where power was abused and they had no power. They may perceive adult programmes as an unacceptable repeat of schooling. Illiterate and under-educated South Africans are also heirs of apartheid education as a major ideological tool shaping specific psychological and attitudinal barriers. Not only did the racist education system shape a psychological inferiority complex in adults and youth, it also operated to maintain and to reinforce negative attitudes to lifelong learning. Disadvantaged and working class illiterates, whose roles in society have been defined and sustained by apartheid education policies, see limited opportunities for themselves. 

Lack of confidence, fear of failure and humiliation, and dislike of competition all play their role here. The following quotation from an Open University report (Open University, 1976) sums up the problems of these barriers to participation:

For those with little formal education, there is a further barrier interposed. Many programmes of study require too high an initial standard of articulacy, vocabulary and previous education. It is precisely because such people either lack or believe they lack these skills that they are unable to gain access to these programmes. The emotional barriers of ignorance and fear will be lifted only by an imaginative provision of information, by access to sensitive counselling and by the provision of introductory or preparatory studies in these basic skills in a manner suited to adult attitudes and requirements. 

Provider or Institutional Barriers

These have to do with the nature of the education, training and development opportunities provided, and are necessarily complex. They include factors relating to information on the provision, entrance requirements, content, structure, delivery, accreditation, certification, flexibility, and a range of cost factors). 

Information

There is not only a failure of institutions to provide this, but also of many adults, particularly the least educated and the poorest, to seek out or use the information available. Communication is a two-way process. Mere provision of information is not enough. Effective communication may well be more expensive, time-consuming, and difficult. Probably, if participation by the poor is desired, it must be done through community-based sources.^[8] 

Johnstone and Rivera (1965), in a 1962 survey in the United States of America, found that one third of adults had no knowledge whatever of educational resources for adults in their communities. Cross (1981, p. 126) claims that about one quarter of the United States’s adult population does ‘not know where to go or whom to ask to get information about learning opportunities’. This ignorance has a social class bias. Johnstone and Rivera (1965) found that in middle sized cities 85% of high socio-economic status people knew of at least one place for adult education. Only 19% of low socio-economic status people did so. Locally, van Heerden reported (1991, p. 26) that:

Lack of information about existing facilities also emerged as a barrier to participation. Those people who had overcome the embarrassment of talking about their lack of education could frequently not find out about any facilities. One learner had spent eight years looking for a night class, while another had wanted to find a place to learn from the time she was 12, and only found a teacher at the age of 35. At the Centres of Concern, most of the participants were there because their employers had told them about the class and word of mouth was often the only source of information. 

People often have inaccurate or no information about costs. Unpleasant early school experience is often an enormous barrier to re-engagement in intentional learning activities. Appropriate information and the way in which it is presented may be crucial in creating a more positive expectation, for it is not just a matter of removing some or all of the barriers to participation, but of going further to adopt positive, outgoing, and involving attitudes, practices, and images to the community at large.  

Government and NGO providers of adult basic education are often criticized for lacking recruitment strategies that would attract adult learners to programmes.^[9] 

Lack of Interesting, Relevant and Practical Courses

Many non-vocational courses are of little practical (cash) value. This is, of course, an inevitable problem with general education, which is of a foundational nature and not in itself capable of direct vocational application (particularly at the lower levels of ABET).[10] This problem is stridently put in a recent attack by the President of the Information Technology Association, Adrian Schofield, on the National Union of Metalworkers (NUMSA). This emerged because NUMSA argued that priority in the use of the Skills Training Levy by the Information Technology Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) should be given to ABET for the under-educated workers and the unemployed, and that basic education should help workers progress up the Information Technology Career path. Schofield said that the sector contributed to the country because it added ‘technicians, programmers and analysts, not because we add vast armies of people who can read and write.’ (Natal Witness 17 December 1999). 

Information on programmes and courses may not specify what the actual outcomes may be reasonably expected to be and what value they have in the hierarchy of certification and educational gate-opening. Information may also be lacking on the extent to which particular programmes and courses are recognized or recommended by important stakeholders in the education or labour marketplace. 

Many courses, for example correspondence courses, demand a high degree of literacy and endurance. Though South Africa has experienced enormous growth in private sector education provision, much of it well advertised and aggressively marketed, most of this provision is aimed at people wanting further or higher education and who have the level of education to make use of these expanding possibilities. 

Lack of Childcare Facilities

Lack of child-care either in the home area or at the provider site is a heavy inhibitor of attendance by women.

Procedural Barriers

Red tape, restrictive admission regulations, and difficulties in getting credit for previous learning are particularly weighted against workers and poorly educated people. Although the NQF purports to embody desirable attributes such as relevance, flexibility, access, portability, and recognition of prior learning, the actual language by which it is described is complicated, jargon filled and by no means simple. The proposed rules for structuring a General Education and Training Certificate for ABET are so complex that it is unlikely that the average ABET learner would understand them without considerable instruction and guidance within a formal education setting. 

Another example of procedural complications is a notice in the magazine Ikhwelo (published by the national Directorate as part of its ABET electives pilot project). It states the following in its February 2000 edition (p. 4): The Ikhwelo Project is for adults who have completed ABET 2 in English and in Numeracy. Adults who have achieved between a Standard 5/Grade 7 and a Standard 7/Grade 9 level will also be able to join. Adults will be interviewed to see if they can enter the programme. 

Anyone interested in joining an Agriculture or SMME programme at one of these centres should please contact their closest centre to find out how to register. Classes are due to start during February 2000 – so interested adults should contact the centre before this time.

It is instructive to look at the procedural barriers implied in the above that would make it difficult to gain admission to these elective programmes that are meant, one supposes, to help poor, unemployed people or subsistence farmers or farm workers:

•             Have a certificates proving you have passed ABET sub-level 2 in English [sic] and  numeracy.

             Or

•             Have certification proving you have passed at least Std 5 in school.

             Or

•             Find out if you are not allowed to join if you have a higher than Std 7 level of schooling. 

2.         Find the address or phone number of a public Adult Learning Centre nearest to oneself listed on page 4 or 5 (though there are no addresses or telephone numbers given). 

3.         Contact this Centre before the beginning of February (though this date is no doubt past because this notice is in the February issue).  

4.         Attend an interview at the Centre and undergo a placement test. 

It is important to stress that this is a pilot project, and hence can be expected to undergo improvements as lessons are learned from experience. Here, it simply being used to illustrate the point that it will be critical to examine rules as procedures as stated for ABET, as these have the potential to constitute serious barriers to learning if they are not kept simple aqnd easy to understand (particularly by the learners themselves).

Barriers and Participation

The decision of individuals not to participate ABET is typically due to the combination of barriers, rather than one or two. An adult learner cannot be forced to attend classes. Even with basic education declared a human right in our new constitution, we do not find the millions of adult learners demanding or presenting themselves for learning and teaching. Even now that we are told that we are all learners; that education is a lifelong process; that we must be educated for change; that we must make better use of our leisure time, the attendance at ABET classes shows no dramatic increase. Before the Ithuteng campaign of 1996, the participation rate in ABE and literacy programmes was less than 1% of the adult population. When the campaign was launched there was an expectation that adult learners would flood public ALCs in the provinces. This did not happen and the participation rate is almost the same as three years ago (Aitchison et al, 2000, pp. 8-10, 34-37). Even when the public ALCs were closed in some provinces during 1997 and 1998, there was little outcry from adult learners. The question to be asked is why adult learners do not demand basic education or present themselves in great numbers. 

In South Africa, adult learners tend to be accommodated by concession rather than by a deliberate policy that would encourage their participation. Opportunities are restricted, and, in order to foster commitment to adult learning, a more adequate policy framework is needed. Darkenwald and Merriam (1982, pp. 121-122) summed up the socio-demographic influences on participation in adult education in the United States of America thus:

In brief, the weight of the evidence suggests that amount of formal schooling and age are the most important socio-demographic factors in predicting participation, a conclusion that may be distressing but not surprising. Those who succeeded in school in their early years, who feel comfortable in the learner role, and who value education are those one would expect to participate in organized adult education. Likewise, it is hardly cause for wonder that older people, particularly those past retirement age, are less likely than younger adults to participate in organized adult education. 

A decade later, Courtney (1992, p. 39) gives a fuller summing up of the United States evidence: Overall [much adult education] is in fact a continuation of formal schooling for certain categories of occupation and the general population. 

Second, it appears that formal adult education results from rather than leads to economic mobility: men and women pursue adult education because they have been successful, so far, rather than want to be successful. 

Third,... formal adult education remains the domain of the younger adult with better levels of prior schooling and income. 

Fourth, [participation in adult education] is related to other forms of participation in that the tendency to undertake learning activities in adulthood correlates with the tendency to have more formal social commitments and to have a leisure agenda which includes more formal types of pleasure consumption. 

Finally,... formal participation in adult education appears to be a function of general social and economic status and that it is by and large the pursuit of the younger adult population suggests that adult education has a strong link with the world of work, the chief means by which that status is maintained and elevated.  

These findings have important consequences for any realistic goals for learner participation in ABET. It is usually those who ‘need’ education the most – the poorly educated – who fail to participate. They, even if highly motivated, perceive barriers to such participation. The table below, Adult education participation in the past 12 months: National Household Education Survey 1995, represents a summary of the socio-demographic factors in USA adult education participation (broadly conceived).

Adult education participation in the past 12 months: National Household Education Survey 1995
		Participation rate (%)
Age	17-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65 +	47.0 48.4 49.2 45.9 28.0 15.2
Sex	Female Male	42.1 38.2
Race	White Black Hispanic	41.5 37.0 33.7
Educational attainment	One to four years of high school High school diploma or GED Vocational/technical school Some college Associate degree Bachelor’s degree or higher	22.9 30.9 41.9 49.3 56.1 58.2
Employment status	Employed Unemployed Not in labour force	50.7 36.6 21.3
Source:   United States Department of Education, National Centre for Education Statistics, National Household Education Survey (NHES), 1995 (Adult Education component)

Undoubtedly these figures reflect the patterns of an incredibly well resourced North American society, but they can nevertheless be usefully compared with particular profiles of participation in adult education in Southern Africa. The evidence is potentially of great interest if South African society does or will exhibit similar educational, economic, social, and technological trends to those already exhibited in the industrialized countries of the Northern hemisphere. 

All this data is clearly not good news about the potential participation of the average South African adult in need of general or basic education, for she is not young, not white, poorly educated, poor and unemployed and therefore highly unlikely to present herself in class or open the door into some other learning environment (compare Harley et al, 1996, p. 46-48).

Recognition of Prior Learning and Experience

Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) can take place either by award of pre-qualifications status (on the basis of experience or of equivalent but non-standard qualifications) or the efficient testing (or placement testing) of required competencies or knowledge. Clearly, given South Africa’s history, there is a very strong case for open access educational facilities, programmes and courses, allied to an intelligent use of RPL and placement assessment. Most recent education and human resource development policy making in South Africa has agreed on the need for a better system of certification and accreditation and for links between formal and non-formal education. Given the enormous number of people who dropped out of school at levels well below their potential because of poverty and/or the crisis in education and/or political unrest, there is a need for open entrance assessment tests, examinations, and certification based on a standardized and generally accepted body of knowledge and skills. 

In practice, the introduction of RPL procedures on any scale has been minimal. No doubt the high levels of unemployment have not created any pull on employers to use RPL as their needs, certainly of people at a general education level, are more than amply met at present and indeed currently many industries require a grade twelve qualification for even menial unskilled jobs. However, the use of placement tests in ABET has shown encouraging growth.^[11] 

The Department of Education publication A Qualification and Assessment system for ABET: towards a framework for implementation developed for use in two ABET elective pilots in public ALCs in the Northern Province and the Eastern Cape of Applied Agriculture and Agricultural Technology and Small, Medium and Micro Enterprises has detailed and useful information on both placement testing and Recognition of Prior Learning (No date [1999], pp. 2.17-28, 2.51-71). The procedures described in this text, though logically sound, are ideal, and therefore unlikely to function well in the current underperforming state public ALC system. Thus, in striving to reach this ideal, the first challenge is improve the core performance of that system, a goal which currently sets the framework for the activities of the DoE Adult Education Directorate. 

Much of the potential for RPL is currently held back by very slow progress in the establishment of a General and Further Education and Training Quality Assurance Body (GEN-FETQA).

 Learner support 

The principle that there should be appropriate support given to learners that is equivalent in quality to the support and backup given to learners in structured learning programmes is of obvious importance in the context of ABET. Except in truly exceptional circumstances, illiterate and undereducated people are not autodidacts who can access learning resources in an imaginative and flexible way without support. Conventional wisdom is that literacy and ABET instruction work best in face-to-face settings with extremely low learner:educator ratios (ideally less than 12 to 1) and that the use of supportive texts (as in distance education) does not work well, if at all.

Support Via Distance Education and/or Technology

There has been a dubious tradition in South African education policy development to recommend that otherwise difficult, marginalized, or hard-to-finance sectors of education provision be treated by essentially technical remedies (such as centrally designed distance education and educational technology). Distance education is seen as important because of the impossibility of financing education for all using conventional means and this delivery method is seen as possibly cheaper. It is considered appropriate (whether in audio/radio, VCR/television, printed text, or computer aided form) largely in a supplementary or supportive way for virtually all target groups – pre-school, school, out-of-school youth, illiterate adults, adults wanting formal school and tertiary qualifications, and prospective teachers and teachers wishing to upgrade their qualifications. Recommendations to this effect have emerged over the last twenty years from the Human Sciences Research Council in 1980, the Education Renewal Strategy of 1991, and the current apostles of telecentres at which communities will be familiarized with new electronic technologies running relevant programmes with a vocational bent. Related to the enthusiasm for distance education is the encouragement for educational technology and computer-assisted learning (CAL), which, in spite of disclaimers to the contrary, is seen as something of a panacea. 

Harley et al (1996, pp. 404-427) provided a detailed survey of the use of computer-assisted learning in ABET. They note the pros (individual learner gains, increased learner self-esteem, technology familiarization skills, cost-effectiveness, and replicability) and cons (need for motivated trained staff, lack of clear understanding of function of learning resources in the educational task, lack of relevant quality software, lack of cost-effectiveness, and infatuation with technology and machines). They conclude that (p. 427):

Further research is needed to assess the real potential of computer-assisted learning for adult basic education in South Africa as well as to produce evidence which will discourage the inappropriate implementation of computer-assisted ABE. Research must not only consider the educational value of CAL, but must also touch on cost-effectiveness, general education and training policy, community development, and information technology and communications policy. If technologically based support solutions are not of immediate assistance, what other learner support mechanisms are available?

Support by Adult Educators and Volunteers

Clearly, more skilled adult educators to provide more direct face-to-face support would help. Budgetary constraints on provincial education departments render growth of paid adults educators unlikely in the near future and, indeed, the quality of public ALC staff may well deteriorate if ABET is used to employ redundant and inadequately qualified or experienced teachers from the schooling system.^[12] IT will be critical to ensure that the quality of educators in the system – in terms of their abilities to engage with adults, not children – remains a cornerstone of employment and professional development strategies. 

Education Minister Asmal’s 1999 call for volunteers to do literacy work might well be something that should be looked at very seriously in the context of support though adult educators as volunteers has both advantages and disadvantages (as pointed out by Baatjes et al, 1999). The disadvantages present serious difficulties. The barriers fall within similar categories as those faced by the adult learners. Issues such as ‘race’, culture, class, gender, language,^[13] and time can simply not be ignored. In addition, experience has shown that, even with educated and interested people, substantial amounts of training are needed to prepare a person for their role as literacy worker. Unfortunately, caring is not enough. Who will deliver the training and support for the volunteers? How does one monitor and regulate quality in a system where support is implemented by volunteers? Could low quality or inappropriate education cause further disadvantage for the learner? Does the urban-rural divide become bigger? These are important questions, for the idea of basic education as a right becomes seriously diluted when one’s education is dependent on the availability of another caring individual who happens to have spare time and an interest.

Support via Courses and Materials

In a system where curricular control is exercised mainly by national outcomes and standards, the quality of actual practical educational processes is, as the Policy Document on Adult Basic Education and Training (Department of Education, 1997a, p. 24) states, ‘left to the initiative and creativity of curriculum developers, materials developers, providers and learners.’ 

Much of the creativity in ABET course and materials development was originally found in non-governmental organizations. These are now sadly and massively depleted, with the surviving materials developers maintaining a fragile existence in alliances with a few educational publishers, themselves threatened by falling sales ^[14] (see Aitchison et al, 2000, pp. 101-102). Much of the 1997 Department of Education policy about materials development has not yet been implemented. This was due to include evaluation of materials (although an audit was carried out in 1998, the planned, continuously updated register of learning and support materials has not yet been established[15]), departmental support for materials development, and the development of appropriate distance materials. 

Changes in course and materials development since the mid-1990s have, apart from the decimation of capacity, seen the following trends (Aitchison et al, 2000, pp. 102-113): 

•      The newer ranges of course materials are published by commercial publishers and are relatively expensive. Small NGOs and CBOs that provide local literacy classes will experience problems buying materials because of the cost implications. ABET learners are least likely to be able to afford to purchase their own learning materials, and, understandably, will have to be subsidized. Anecdotal information suggests that these ABET providers will continue to photocopy, where possible, use old IEB examinations as a learning syllabus, and generally make do with as few materials as possible. 

•     Materials are now available separately ‘off the shelf’ and not only within restrictive training packages. Most course materials are no longer linked to training agencies and therefore not available separate from training

•     Materials are often marketed and sold as complete packs, which contain all material necessary to pass the Independent Examinations Board examinations. This is not a new phenomenon in ABET or educational publishing, but does little to support those organizations publishing ABET supplementary material (readers or newspapers) and is hardly conducive to the idea of the widely read learner or open learning. Indeed, it may partly explain why producers of supplementary materials (readers, newspaper supplements) are coming under increased financial pressure and a drop in book sales.^[16] In response, some independent publishers developing supplementary materials have contracted with commercial course developers to produce limited supplementary materials to form part of these complete teaching packs. 

This production of only full courses or programmes is in marked contrast to the Policy document on Adult Basic Education and Training. October 1997 (Department of Education, 1997a, p. 27) which states that: It is envisaged that ABET materials will increasingly be modularised rather than presented as a full course. Thus there will be potentially a greater variety of modular units of learning materials, either discrete or integrated that meet the needs of a diversity of learners and institutional settings, and which can be combined in the most effective way. 

•     There is little course development in any languages other than English and Afrikaans, and most ABET courses are concentrated at the lower ABET sub-levels. There is little by way of courses on learning areas other than English and numeracy, though there are moves to produce materials for other learning areas.

•     The shift to outcomes-based education is generally not represented in new ABET course materials/syllabuses. 

•    There is still, in spite of publisher claims to the contrary, no common understanding of ABET levels and standards. Publishers say their materials are in line with the either the Independent Examinations Board (IEB) outcomes/competencies or the draft ABET Unit standards. A serious review of the actual materials suggests otherwise – levels are erratic and standardization is not apparent when measured against stated ABET unit standards and specific outcomes. 

•     Less time is spent innovating, testing, and piloting materials. 

•     There is a strong urban bias in materials.  

•    There is very little genuine updating or revision of older materials. Though developers and publishers claim that their older material has been ‘revised’ or re-written in order to remain up to date with current developments (usually unit standards, IEB competencies/outcomes, or OBE). A review suggests that materials that were developed before 1996 have generally not altered at all (or at best have a few new exercises or a changing of the back cover with a claim to being IEB congruent). In making this point, a distinction must be made between good, well-designed courses that in essence can be seen as outcomes based and are methodologically sound, but which do not employ the jargon of OBE or unit standards, and courses that are poorly designed and/or methodologically unsound or outdated. Some ABET courses are among the best available, but do not employ the new OBE jargon at all. It would be unfortunate if such courses were rejected by buyers simply because they do not employ the new vocabulary. It was generally older courses published by the older commercial training organizations that often claimed to be revised which tended to mechanically make-over dated courses with the new technical vocabulary. 

•     The publishers and materials developers generally have a rather pessimistic view of the future for ABET materials in spite of there being enormous opportunities and a potentially large market. The current climate is bleak and risky and the organizations are disappointed by the lack of government support for ABET (and indeed some organizations contend that ABET publishing, particularly of supplementary materials such as readers will never be viable without government or donor sponsorship). A number of organizations were no longer going to publish supplementary materials and readers and others were going to move out of ABET into a more promising training field. 

While some of the above trends are beneficial to from an open learning perspective (such as materials being available off the shelf and a learner being able to access material covering a full course) most are not. A genuinely open learning approach would require, as far as materials are concerned, a wide variety of accessible (cheap) materials in a variety of languages, covering a range of learning areas, and whose educational levels were easily and accurately identifiable. 

In examining the issue of support materials in this detail, we make a common assumption that resources of well-prepared materials are a necessary aspect of open learning. However, two cautions are necessary in relation to associating materials-based learning with open learning: 

The first caution asks whether materials are an inferior substitute for other (more costly) methods of instruction. Tight (1996, p. 96) warns against ‘the use of open learning to refer to the use of learning packages designed to impart work-related skills cheaply and with minimal support’. He sees this as having been increasingly adopted by both industry and government in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, ‘as a cost- effective substitute for more conventional forms of training’. 

The other caution queries whether materials-based learning (as used typically in much distance education) does not actually restrict genuine access to only a relatively sophisticated group of learners. Manning (2000) states ‘My assumptions about distance education include that it is not for everyone, it is for more mature, self directed learners who have a fairly clear motivation for learning, can work with a high degree of independence and are willing to work without immediate direction, and could in all likelihood get the material for themselves, given time, but have chosen to take a class because they believe it to be a short cut to mining information themselves.’

Maintenance of Rigorous Quality Assurance Over the Design of Learning Materials and Support Systems

In a situation in which basic provision of ABET by the state is not even guaranteed and the future of literacy and of ABET provision by NGOs and the private sector is murky, it may seem somewhat precious to get too concerned and rigorous about the quality of existing provision, support, and resources. 

The ultimate test of quality of design and support in the ABET field (and also of its cost effectiveness) is the output of adult learners who can be said to have a good general education as a result of engaging with educational provision and resources. At present it is very difficult to do this. If it ranges from very difficult to impossible to obtain reliable data on the number of adults enrolled in state[17], business, and NGO ABET programmes, it is even more difficult to get the remotest idea on the output of successful learners. Currently, the only reliable source of output data in South Africa is the Independent Examinations Board, which has information on results from 236,511 registrations, mainly from candidates in the business sector, for specific ABET examination papers since 1995. The results reported by French (1997) (indicating a 48.4% pass rate) are mediocre. As it can probably be safely assumed that providers who enrol their candidates for IEB examinations are the better organized and resourced and more confident ones, overall the expectations of successful outcomes from ABET learning in South Africa must be relatively low. This is particularly problematic when the value of an ABET certificate is minimal in a country with such high unemployment amongst people with higher qualifications. Employers are increasingly demanding ‘matric’ (i.e. a senior certificate) as a minimum entrance qualification for even the most menial of jobs.  

Counter to this somewhat bleak picture, the quality of some of the courses, materials, and support in ABET in South Africa is remarkably high. There are also moves, through the national Department of Education, to commission an evaluation of ABET materials listed in an audit conducted in 1998.

 Conclusion 

This chapter has undertaken a wide-ranging analysing of ABET in South Africa. It reveals that – from an open learning perspective – there are still enormous challenges facing effective provision of ABET in the country. Likewise, it has indicated certain dangers that exist in creating overly complicated regulatory and implementation systems in this field, particularly given the wide range of contexts and educational needs encapsulated by the ABET sector. These points should not be taken to mean that systematisation of adult education provision does not have value; on the contrary, the chapter points to the importance of finding ways to streamline and improve aspects of ABET provision in this way. While progress has been made in many areas, it is critical to ensure that ongoing implementation of ABET does not lead to overcomplicated systems of implementation. It will be important to keep regulatory frameworks simple, and then back them up with effective, systemic support for adult educators working in many diverse areas. 

With this analysis in place, we now turn our attention to barriers to learning in schools,  despite many obvious differences, there are many similar challenges.

 Footnotes 

^[1] In South Africa, adult basic education (ABE) can be defined as education provision for people aged 15 and over who are not engaged in formal schooling or higher education and who have an education level of less than grade nine. How does ABE differ from literacy?  If one takes a commonsense view that literacy is about being able to read, write and do sums, then ABE is about the basic education (more of less equivalent to the general or the compulsory period of education in schools), which of course includes the teaching of these literacy and numeracy skills. Clearly, ABE is much more formal than literacy and can be provided through a classroom curriculum in some form of ABE system (such as that implemented in South Africa).

In South Africa in the 1990s a discourse about ABET replaced the previous non-formal discourse of the 1980s in which the term literacy was dominant.. Today, it is considered necessary for adult learners to have a broader knowledge base than mere alphabetization, which implies that teachers of literacy and ABE also need to be better skilled. But the narrow instrumentalist views of literacy that govern some literacy and ABET programmes and practices are dangerously decontextualized in ignoring the social backgrounds, needs, and purposes of adult learners. A broader conception of literacy sees it as a highly ethical endeavour that has as its goal the liberation of people for intelligent, meaningful, and humane action upon the world.

^[2] This is not to say that this type of literacy work did not have its own ideological and educational pitfalls, including a pitifully small output of people who could in any reasonable sense be called ‘literate’.

^[3] This conflation of OBE and certain teaching methods is usefully discussed in A Qualification and assessment system in ABET: towards a framework for implementation (Department of Education, No date [1999], p. 1:3) thus:

Two issues worth noting are as follows: Does an OBET approach demand a particular teaching methodology? Some people have argued that outcomes are to do with outputs and should not be confused with inputs. In other words, how a learner achieves an outcome - the inputs, such as teaching and learning approaches, learning tasks and activities, materials and so on - is irrelevant, as long as the learner can demonstrate the achievement of the outcome. On the other hand, many outcomes are themselves designed in order to promote certain values. This has implications for teaching methodology. For example, outcomes that demand proactive, critical and independent learners will best be achieved through teaching methods that use approaches such as activity-based learning, group work, integrated tasks and so on. What does this mean for teaching and assessment practices?  As we suggested above, the South African version of OBET does promote a learner centred and activity-based approach to teaching and learning. These things are not of course new, or exclusive only to OBET. Good teaching draws on these ideas and practices along with many other strategies.

[4] An example of such wording can be found in the unit standards for Applied Agriculture and Agricultural Technology at NQF level one.(see Learning programme guidelines for ABET, pp. 73-75.

[5]  This can be found in the comprehensive statement entitled Call to action: mobilizing citizens to build a South African Education and training system for the 21^st century.

^[6] This problem may also lead to unethical providers promising ‘fast track’ programmes which cannot possible deliver educationally worthwhile outcomes.

[7] Limited data from four provinces give a female : male ratio of 7 to 3). (Aitchison et al (2000, p. 36). National figures reveal 68% female, 32% male in public ALCs so this ratio is fairly accurate.

^[8] Local government may be one of the most effective agents for communicating information about adult education possibilities. In many boroughs in cities in the United Kingdom, adult education information is regularly distributed to every household.

^[9] However, there is a complication here if there is a mismatch between recruitment activities and the reality of provision. In the period from 1995 onwards, the national Department of Education’s Adult Education and Training Directorate, in cooperation with its provincial analogues, launched a number of campaigns where there was a lack of provision follow through after recruitment. For example, in Kwazulu Natal a Department of Education and Culture document of 1996 spoke of a ‘mobilization of 40,000 learners in 1997 even if they are not brought to classes.’ (KwaZulu Natal Department of Education and Culture, 1996). This provision failure places a big question mark against the often extremely energetic advocacy for ABET flighted on SABC radio and television channels, particularly from 1995 to 1997.

[10] This partly explains why some Standards Generating Bodies being formed under SAQA are reluctant to generate standards in their specific sub-fields at NQF level 1. The idea that ABET should be precisely that, basic and general, and not attempt to do training or venture into specific, vocationally orientated learning sub-fields is a matter that has not yet been fully debated or resolved.

^[11] Aitchison et al (2000, p. 120) found in a small survey conducted in 1998 that there was a wide range of selection, placement and examination readiness tests of varying quality being used (including old Independent Examinations Board exam papers) by ABET providers and that, invariably, where they were used, this coincided with reasonable terminal examination results.

^[12] In many provinces, one of the aims of the attempt to transform night schools into adult learning centres was to end up with dedicated adult educators rather than having to rely on school teachers (usually untrained in adult education) who put in extra time. Unfortunately, the beginning of the attempts to sort out staffing of the public ALCs coincided with provinces feeling it was a political imperative to absorb unemployed school teachers into the system, a logic based on assumptions that this would be economically effective. From an educational and economic perspective, however, this approach has not succeeded as was hoped, particularly as many of those teachers are products of an apartheid education system and hence themselves are under-prepared for the requirements of adult education. Securing adequately skilled human resources for the adult education system remains a major challenge.

^[13] Mother-tongue literacy is central to any literacy project. Learning to read and write in the mother-tongue is of critical importance, as it would give priority to the histories, cultures, class and genders of the learners. If, mother-tongue literacy is central to the learning process, it presents probably the biggest barrier because it demands that the volunteer knows the language, values, beliefs and expressions of the learners.

^[14] The Era Initiative report on Easy readers for adults in South Africa: an investigation into their use  (ERA Initiative, 1999, pp. 33-34) notes that spending on school textbooks declined from R900 million in 1994 to R150 million in 1998 and that 2000 educational publishing staff were laid off in 1998.

[15] This work is currently underway and has been commissioned to the ERA Initiative (update of audit) and IEB (evaluation of LSMs).

^[16] There were reports in September 1999 of the pulping of thousands of unsold easy readers, including those in African languages, because of the crisis in the educational publishing industry (Eveleth, 1999).

[17] Information on enrolment in public ALCs is captured in a national ABET MIS based on a national survey conducted in March 1999, but this has still to be released by the Minister.