Transport Skills and the Challenges of the SA School System

The transport and logistics systems in South Africa are facing critical challenges to future efficiency, due to the decreasing availability of technical, managerial, and operational skills, writes NICK PORÉE.

The danger of the situation is aggravated by the continual expansion of the logistics sector and the increasing sophistication of the equipment and technology. The ageing population of fully qualified managers and technicians and the continual leakage of skilled people due to emigration are accelerating the shortages.

The lack of effective training in all three categories of employment is the result of the decisions on education taken by the government after 1994. Before that, road transport management was taught at Rand Afrikaans University (20 000 graduates by 2000), and technicians were apprenticed and attended technical colleges to obtain qualifications in their trade. The training included years of apprenticeship under the supervision of qualified journeymen. Advanced driver trainer courses were provided at Luipaardsvlei in Krugersdorp and provision was made in the Road Transport Quality System (RTQS) for the professional driver qualification and registration.

All of the foregoing was premised on the assumption that every child would receive basic education, which was interpreted to mean “reading, writing, and arithmetic” as the basic requirements for learning. The shift to the new curriculum in 1996 was a move to “outcomes-based learning” as a more modern approach. The concept may be applicable where basic education is effective, but in the South African situation it has caused chaos by failing to teach the basics required for learning. As reported in 2012 by researchers from Northwest University in the International Business & Economics Research Journal: “The education system was flawed, with poorly performing teachers, poor work ethics, lack of community and parental support, poor control by education authorities, poor support for teachers and very low levels of accountability. These factors further spilt over into the morale of learners and could be seen in the lack of discipline, brutal violence in schools, low moral values, truancy, absenteeism, late coming and high dropout rates from Grade 1 to Grade 12 and very poor performance in essential areas such as Mathematics and Literacy.”

According to the Department of Basic Education, while there were 750 478 students who wrote matric exams in 2021, only 259 143 wrote mathematics. Of these, 34 451 passed with a score of at least 60%… a pass rate of just 5%. The current situation, according to the Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality, is that after five years of schooling about 50% of South African pupils cannot do basic calculations, such as dividing 24 by three. This is hardly surprising when 60% of maths teachers for Grades 1 to 6 failed to pass tests for maths at the grade level. The reasons for this are diluted teacher qualifications alongside a lack of competence, motivation, and control due to managerial incompetence. This is backed up by aggressive Union protection of teacher rights, with little consideration for accountability.   

The result of 25 years of poor education is the current huge mass of school leavers who, due to literacy and arithmetical deficiency, are untrainable in technical and electrical trades, electrical, machining, design, or as automotive technicians.

In the supervisory and managerial fields, meanwhile, the limitations are evident in the fields of programming, vehicle selection and management, mathematical analyses, use of reports and standards, manuals, and budgeting and monitoring systems.

According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), unlocking the manufacturing sector’s potential in developing countries hinges on a number of enabling factors, not least the availability of a workforce with the appropriate skills and education. “Yet an increasingly automated workplace calls for a new skill set,” it states. “Future industrial workers will need to be more creative, flexible and possess technological know-how to thrive in the new reality. This necessitates a complete overhaul of vocational training, not just a simple upgrade of existing skills.” The current South African skills deficiencies make us highly vulnerable in the face of the looming increases in technology. The limited number of fully trained, competent, and equipped vehicle computer diagnosticians is a case in point.

The decision to follow other countries in establishing the Sector Education and Training Authority (SETA) system has resulted in the same failures evident in 1980 in the UK’s Road Transport Industry Training Board (RTITB), which led to the collapse of the system within about five years. The assumption that a levy system will produce effective industrial training has been shown to fail; conflating workplace skills requirements with academic education ignores the essential element of “mentored experience” in practical work situations.

Apprenticeships require four to five years of working with a journeyman to experience the wide range of challenges in a technician’s job. Supervisory and managerial development requires years of working experience to acquire the range of multidisciplinary skills needed to manage complex situations. Recent research at the University of Johannesburg has shown that transport students regard “transport management” as the most important field of knowledge for success. This is followed closely by “knowledge of the industry”, “decision making”, “problem solving”, and then “warehouse management”. None of these are adequately addressed by the Transport Education and Training Authority (TETA).

We need to understand the dynamics of skill formation in South Africa. We need to see the skill formation system as the full picture of knowledge and skills produced in schooling, colleges, universities, and other education providers, as well as training that happens in workplaces. The relative strength and size of each of these are shaped by the economy and the types of labour markets that exist within it. The impact of the deteriorating technical capacity is shown dramatically in the excellent South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) 2022 infrastructure report focusing on state institutions, but with implications equally relevant to private industry.

If the transport and logistics industry does not do something drastic to provide future solutions to current skills training problems, many of the existing problems will worsen rather than improving. It is useless to expect the current education structures to deliver the necessary base material for industrial training. Nevertheless, solutions must be found and implemented. Human resources researchers say that the rapid exodus of skilled professionals opting to work abroad is leaving large skills gaps. “Training has never been more crucial,” according to these researchers, and it must be agile with clear outcomes. This is the only way for organisations to close those gaps quickly and effectively in order to survive and thrive.