What NGOs Reveal About Vocational Education’s Possibilities

Abstract

Technical and vocational education and training (TVET) policy in South Africa is undergoing reform with increased emphasises on standardising curricula, benchmarking institutions, and tightening requirements for lecturer qualifications. These reforms, however, do not address the needs of marginalised youth and they limit innovative teaching. This article draws on qualitative research across three case studies of NGOs who operate adult and community education programmes on the Cape Flats in the Western Cape. The theoretical approach draws on an integrated framework that combines Freire’s critical pedagogy, social capital theory, and Sen’s capability approach. This analysis examines the NGO programmes as alternative models that reveal what vocational education achieves when freed from compliance structures. Across the three independent organisations, 926 coded excerpts revealed three findings: belonging functions as the foundational condition that should be established before any other development is possible, structural consciousness is embedded in the curriculum and continues across staff changes, and practitioner wisdom constitutes Indigenous theorising that produces frameworks that parallel academic theory through praxis. Educators who create programmes in response to the community context create different pedagogical possibilities. This study reveals how these programmes prioritise dialogical learning and local knowledge systems in ways that academicised TVET, as currently configured, tends not to accommodate. The study provides concrete examples of what humanising vocational education looks like in practice. The findings challenge the assumptions that academisation represents progress. The question shifts for decolonial TVET scholarship from how to build alternative approaches to why existing approaches are not being learned from.