In the context of post-apartheid South Africa, political influences on curriculum were extremely significant. Jansen (1999) notes that there was a critical turning point in curriculum debates in 1990 when competing social movements and political actors began articulating their positions on curriculum in anticipation of a new democracy. A number of policy discourses emerged, creating competition and divergence on the question of educational restructuring (Kraak, 1998).
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From 1994 onwards, education policy development in general reflected three distinct phases of restructuring, shaped by both political and economic factors. In the early transitional phase (1994–5) the priority was to operate through wide participatory and consultative processes, expunge all traces of apartheid education in the school curriculum, and focus on the policy agenda as framed by the visions of a popular liberation movement.
Democratic values, redress and equity were key concerns in developing an accountable education system responsive to the needs of those who had been previously excluded. This guiding principle resulted in the creation of a single education ministry and a standardised school curriculum. The National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE), appointed in 1995, was tasked with recommending how the higher education system could be unified and modernised to respond to the new democracy’s urgent need for economic and social reconstruction (Ensor, 2004). This phase was underpinned by the original ANC economic policy, the developmental Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP), which emphasised redistribution of wealth between the wealthy white minority and the impoverished majority (Sayed & Jansen, 2001; Subotzky, 2000).
Soon, however, the economic realities of governing after 1994 necessitated a dramatic shift toward a more stringent fiscal policy, reflected in the adoption in June 1996 of the Growth, Employment and Redistribution strategy (GEAR). This policy aimed to encourage foreign investment, and stimulate growth. On a national level, the claim of South Africa to become an international player, participating in a post-modern global economy, introduced the discourse of economic rationalism, skills development and globalisation as shaping influences in the educational arena (Kraak, 2001). The discourse of competency and skills within ANC education policy has been ascribed to the introduction by COSATU of debates on competency-based education in the labour sector. Responses in policy to these claims were the introduction in 1995 of the National Qualifications Framework (NQF)34, which sought to integrate education and training through a common qualifications framework (Chisholm, 2005). Concurrent with this high-skills focus – in which graduates should acquire skills for employment, particularly enhanced technological skills – were increasing economic
34 South African Qualifications Authority Act (SAQA Act), Act 58 of 1995.
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pressures imposed on the higher education sector to become more efficient, be accountable, increase access, and assure high quality education, all in a context of reduced state subsidies.
The Higher Education Act of 199735 attempts to balance the competing claims of redressing the overwhelming inequalities in higher education with the need to increase efficiency in the production of skilled graduates who can contribute to the competitiveness of the country in the global market. Two conflicting discourses appear in the policy documents during this period. The first reflected the pressing need to move away from the apartheid past toward equity and redress, framed in a discourse of social justice and human rights, in the face of severe resource constraints (Ensor, 2004). The second took on board the notion of transferrable credits and modularisation combined with the preparation of graduates for participation in a sophisticated global economy. This latter trend gradually translated into a neo-liberalist emphasis on globalisation and a “high skills” agenda, with the added impetus of a National Qualifications Framework (NQF), and the introduction of quality assurance measures through the South African Quality Assurance Authority (SAQA).36
The way around these opposing tensions was to avoid dealing with the specifics of curriculum restructuring in higher education. In the implementation of policy however, in curriculum reconstruction terms, Ensor (2002, p. 290) observes how these two discourses appeared to compete for ascendancy. The contrasting curriculum discourses that appear in the policy documents are, on the one hand, the traditional discipline knowledge discourse, where academics espouse an apprenticeship into disciplinary ways of knowing and thinking, and on the other, the opposing discourse of credit accumulation and transfer oriented toward producing highly skilled graduates for the workplace. These conflicting emphases reflect wider oppositional objectives in the entire higher education system. Scott and Yeld (2009) argue however that these agendas have become inter-related as the thrust toward achieving national developmental needs encompasses the demand for equity of access and
35 Act 101 of 1997.
36 Introduced by Act 58 of 1995.
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outcomes in higher education. Improved graduate output is seen as “essential for economic growth…as well as for social cohesion” (Pandor, 2006).37
With particular reference to “the professional discourse, strongly associated with medical, law and engineering faculties”, Ensor (2004) comments that talk of curriculum restructuring was hardly heard during the NCHE38 deliberations, since these faculties were largely unaffected by the NCHE’s policy recommendations. This “business as usual” approach is consistent with the conservatism of lawyers and is reflected in the post apartheid law curricula that were developed, despite the influence of a strong ”Africanisation” discourse being voiced throughout the political deliberations preceding the changes made in legal education in 1995-6.
In considering curricular models in higher education, professional discourse is characterised as placing emphasis on “vertical pedagogic relations, an emphasis upon apprenticing students into specific knowledge domains, and limited student choice over selection of the curriculum” (Ensor, 2004). Ensor correctly classifies law as a professional discourse which has vertical pedagogic relations and emphasises an apprenticeship. The signature pedagogy of law endorses exactly this hierarchical structuring ((Kennedy, 2004; Shulman, 2005, p. 56).
Further, the limited student choice over subjects is evident in the fairly consistent approach to curriculum development that displays little variation among seventeen faculties.
Modularisation, a shift toward a system of transferable credits and the market-isation and massification of higher education all served to shape higher education (and Law) curricula towards employability of graduates in the market. The presence of practice-related (skills) modules in many curricula responds to the requirements of the legal profession for semi- trained candidate attorneys.
37 Speech by Naledi Pandor, Minister of Education, introducing the debate on the education Budget Vote 2006/07, National Council of Provinces, 23 May 2006. Accessed at :
http://www.search.gov.za/info/previewDocument.jsp?dk=%2Fdata%2Fstatic%2Finfo%2Fspeeches%
2F2006%2F06052316151002.htm%40Gov&q=(+affirmative+%3CAND%3E+action+)&t=N+Pandor%3A +Education+Dept+Budget+Vote+debate%2C+NCOP. 7 October, 2009.
38 National Council on Higher Education.
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The contestation over these two discourses was confirmed by Kraak (2001) who described how in higher education the further element was added of “stratification” thinking, of differentiated levels of institutions, but this was finally excluded by the National Plan for Higher Education (Ministry of Education, 2001) and replaced with the notions of mergers to rationalise the tertiary education landscape. Woolman et al (1997, p.63) identified the preoccupation in legal education with the discourse of “Africanisation,” which placed an emphasis on representivity and transformation. Ntshoe (2002) added “managerialism” to the mix of pressures imposed on higher education as part of the accountability project.
The making of education policy in post-apartheid South Africa was described by Jansen (2002) as a “politics of symbolism”, disconnected from serious concerns about changing educational practice at grass roots level. He quoted Rensburg39, a pre-eminent policy-maker at the time, who described the period 1994–1999 as an “overtly ideological-political period, which reflected the shift from apartheid ideology and politics…to a democratic order marked in particular by non-racialism.” Jansen focused attention on the importance that was attached to policy statements, while little or no reference was made to policy implementation. In reality, the government lacked the material support necessary to implement much of the ambitious policy rhetoric set out in the education policy documents.
A further indicator of the “symbolic prominence of policy” was evident in the lack of coherence in the various education policy documents across different contexts, where “each process had its own agenda, its own actors and focus” (Jansen, 2002). This pattern of
“political symbolism as policy craft”, the phrase coined by Jansen (2002, p.214) was echoed in the seemingly “dislocated” enactment of a major policy shift that occurred in legal education during that period. Midgley (2007) sees the absence of dialogue between the Department of Education and the Department of Justice in 1995−6 ahead of changing a variety of university legal qualifications to a single undergraduate degree as an example of this policy “dislocation”
39 October, 1998: Address to National Policy Review Conference of the ANC by Dr Ihron Rensburg, Deputy-Director General, Education.
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According to Jansen (2002) one of the critical consequences of this kind of symbolic political stance was that the blame for non-delivery shifts to the participants in the education process (teachers, lecturers and managers), while “policy and planning failures are exempt from scrutiny” For as long as this continued reliance on political symbolism remains in place as the framework for education policy , accountability and improved efficiency present themselves as pretexts to justify reduced expenditure by government on education. Jansen maintains further that over-investment in the symbolism of educational change impedes the real transformation and improvement of education (Jansen, 2002). It could be argued that the symbolic policy intention was to signal a clean break with the apartheid past, but beneath the surface there was an element of “disguising the nature of the strategic trade- offs necessary to win broad consensus” (Cloete et al., 2002, p. 25). I have argued that these predictions have been borne out in practice with the experience of legal education in the last decade.
Much of the educational theorising in South Africa during the period was one-dimensional, creating polarities which led in turn to oversimplified policies that had an appeal for activists but sometimes turned out to be educationally misguided (Young, 2001). The theories that informed policy were often “overly idealistic in their applicability as a basis for policy”. The assumption that the language of democratic participation could apply in any straightforward way to achieving educational goals, and the failure to recognise the specificity of educational goals such as pedagogy and curriculum in effecting educational change, have been severely criticised (Young, 2001).
Ultimately, the adoption of neo-liberal policies within an “uncertain framework of political and moral compromise” was an outcome settled on between political players (Kallaway, 2002). Novel forms of negotiation emerged, suggesting that in the higher education context
“policy formulation and change is ultimately a political process characterised by competing interests and compromises” (Badat, 1997).
Then suddenly, in 1996, indecisive leadership, the slow pace of integration in the Ministry of Education, crisis situations in many schools and universities, the “unrelenting demands from education stakeholders for transformation from universities, colleges, technikons, schools and elsewhere”, were all overshadowed by the surprise publication of a proposal to
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introduce outcomes-based education. One effect of this was to open up public debate on curriculum (Jansen & Christie, 1999). The sudden shift from within the Department of Education to outcomes-based education as a basis for curriculum policy in both schools and higher education signalled a new emphasis on “accountability, vocationalism and market- value at all levels of the education system” (Jansen & Christie, 1999). It was a process of curriculum development that relied on “drawing down” knowledge, skills and values from key “critical and developmental” outcomes that were legislated.40 The technocist and behaviourist underpinnings of this approach were inescapable and provoked a spate of critique (Jansen & Christie, 1999), but the symbolic break with apartheid education ensured support at grass roots level. In 2009, Bloch, an early advocate of outcomes-based education, has acknowledged that those responsible for its introduction were over-optimistic in introducing at schools an OBE curriculum that was unrealistic and impossible to apply.
Whilst maintaining that “curriculum is at the crucial interface where pupils prepare themselves intellectually and academically for a global world”, the author admits that OBE was a tragic mistake in the context of South African education.41
Curriculum policy frameworks were developed centrally without attention to the context of implementation and how the new vision could be effected in profoundly unequal contexts (Blignaut, 2007; Christie, 1999). Harley and Wedekind (2004) observe as an anomaly that the post-apartheid curricular changes introduced as a “political project” have ironically worked, in historically-disadvantaged contexts, in a counter-productive way to undermine the transformatory social goals envisaged by the developers. According to the authors, “the fit between policy intention and curriculum effect is anything but functional”. It was assumed that changes can be effected through “ideal-type, framework visions”, which do not engage with the conditions of their implementation (Christie, 1999). Numerous studies have shown that this “top down” approach to educational policy-making has proved
40 National Education Policy Act 27 of 1996.
41 “Lessons must be Learned” Article in The Times, Wednesday, September 16, 2009. Comments on the text “The Toxic Mix- What’s Wrong with South Africa’s Schools and How to Fix It?” (Tafelberg, 2009).
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ineffectual in producing real change. Elmore (1983) explains many of the failures, or “non- events”, of educational policy translating into implementation as “the power of the bottom over the top”
In 2002 the Minister of Education declared that the apartheid legacy has “continued to burden the higher education system, which not only remains fragmented on race lines, but has been unable to rise fully to meet the challenges of reconstruction and development”42 The organisational behaviour and structure of South African universities were shaped by their specific cultural rules and normative and legal frameworks; every institution sought to reposition itself as the demise of apartheid became apparent (Wolpe, 1995, quoted in Ruth, 2006). These structural disparities remain evident in multiple ways, including in the curricula that have been developed at each institution in the post-apartheid period.
The policy documents relating to the restructuring of higher education barely mentioned how curricula should be developed, other than to state that the higher education system should establish “responsive programmes, educational programmes conducive to a critically constructive civil society, advancement of all forms of knowledge and scholarship” (Ensor, 2002; NCHE, 1996). Thus, despite the creation of an extensive framework of education policy pronouncements through the 1990s and early 2000s, South African educators, particularly in higher education, had to extrapolate what was relevant for them – and respond to the national economic and policy imperatives – in designing curricula that would meet the new demands within the landscape of higher education.
In 2002 the cabinet approved a programme of reforms to alter the existing higher education landscape dramatically. Institutional mergers were proposed as a means of rationalising the uneven proliferation of institutions, with effect from January, 2004. According to Education Minister Kader Asmal, the higher education landscape reflected “the geopolitical imagination of apartheid planners” The number of universities was reduced from 21 to 11.
Jansen (2002) argued that the mergers were intended to address historical racial inequalities between institutions, the downturn in student enrolments, and also “the need to incorporate the South African higher education system within fast-changing, technology-
42 Minister of Education, Kader Asmal in: South African Ministry of Education Report, 2002.
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driven and information-based economies, described under the rubric of globalisation”43 The merger outcomes, which in total, reduced 36 institutions to 21 higher education institutions, and established two new institutions, “were the product of a complex interplay between governmental macro-politics and institutional micro-politics, in a context of political transition” (Jansen, 2002).
Thus it was clear that education policy could not be regarded as a phenomenon taking place outside of or distinct from the wider political currents of the moment. The policies that were enacted reflected the tumultuous social re-structuring that was taking place as the surrounding context for educational change. However, in the implementation phase, the translation of those policies into practice was not a simple – nor a rational – linear process.
2.4 From policy to practice: developing curricula that interpret