Teacher education, as part of the larger transformation project in post-apartheid South Africa, has undergone radical change and review since 1994. The teacher education system created by the apartheid government was inequitable and racially segregated: the majority of teachers (mostly Black) received state-controlled college teacher training and a minority of teachers (mostly White) received a university teacher education. The post-apartheid government faced the massive challenge of restructuring the system it inherited. Since 1994, a number of significant changes in teacher education have taken place. These include closing teacher training colleges and locating teacher education within the ambit of higher education, creating a National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and adopting an outcomes-based education orientation, formulating and implementing a new teacher education policy, and addressing unevenness and issues of quality in the system through university mergers and a national review process of teacher education programmes.

Popkewitz (2000) argues that the “historicity” of these (change) processes—that is, the overarching time/space/place framework provided by the macro-context in which they are embedded—must be taken into account. Following his argument, in the first section of this article we describe and explain a key element of the national context of educational transformation that has shaped change in the structure and organization of teacher education. Given the scope and complexity of transformation in South Africa, and the instability and fluidity that has characterized the educational landscape, we focus on that key element: the vision of transformation in relation to a larger state modernizing project driven by two powerful and competing imperatives for change. Our main contention is that educational transformation in South Africa is a complex and multifaceted social process. Teacher education is at the nexus of many axes of tension created by a modernization project driven by opposing national and global agendas. This situation has implications for the restructuring and reorganization of the teacher education system, and the nature and form of initial and in-service teacher education programmes since 1994.

In the first section we outline and explain how the broad vision of transformation has been driven by a national imperative of sociopolitical transformation, and the increasing pressures of globalization as South Africa reentered the global economy after 1994 (Jansen 1999a; Chisholm 2004). In the second section we focus on the implications for curriculum and teacher education policy development. In the third section our focus shifts to an account of how the system of teacher education has been influenced by a social reconstructivism and economic instrumentalism. We then illuminate some challenges and difficulties, and the conclusion synthesizes our discussion.

The vision of transformation in South Africa

Post-1994 South African initiatives for transforming education initiatives encompassed essential priorities, including redress, equity, democracy, and quality. These are seen as being linked to a larger governmental modernizing project, the goal of which is to ensure local legitimacy and international credibility (Kraak 1999; Mattson and Harley 2003). But paradoxically this modernizing project is informed by two competing state imperatives for change: social reconstructivism and economic instrumentalism. The state’s sociopolitical imperative for change is driven by the requirements for redress, social justice, and equity, and the need to create a more consistently modern, democratic way of life. On the other hand, the state necessarily responds to an economic imperative for change, motivated by the need to alleviate poverty and unemployment and ensure that South Africa is competitive within a global economy. According to Kraak (1999), dissonance between these discourses has given rise to great confusion and controversy in the policy terrain. A decade later, Spreen and Vally (2010) found that this tension remains a recurrent theme in the challenges faced by the South African government since 1994.

Transformation is underpinned by modernist liberal ideals of a fairer and more just society, increased individual freedom, and a vibrant economy with efficient and skilled workers (Dahlberg 2000). A review of international literature (for example, Popkewitz 2000, 2001; Ball 2004; Olssen et al. 2004) reveals that South Africa’s education system, like those in other national contexts, has been forced to respond to the needs of a global economy.

Spreen and Vally (2010) analyzed international policy literature during the past two decades; they say that “[…] in the context of ‘hard economic times’, most western countries have been seeking to restructure public schooling to make it more responsive to the needs of the economy” (p. 429). They also say that global economic imperatives are seen as having increasingly defined the limits of national policies as nation states have become beholden to market forces (p. 432). But they caution that it is misleading to see all nation states as powerless and captives of globalization. A consequence of the global economic imperative has been the post-apartheid government’s receptiveness to advice on policy formulation from outside consultants whose thinking is informed by “human-capital development” and “rates of return analysis” (p. 432). The most explicit manifestation of borrowing is arguably the post-apartheid state’s decision to develop the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) with an outcomes-based design and orientation.

Market forces provided the impetus for integrating the historically separate worlds of work and learning by creating the NQF, a new framework for qualifications, as provided for by the 1995 South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) Act. The consequence was the emergence of a new discourse that included notions of skills, re-skilling, outcomes, competence, accountability, quality assurance, lifelong learning, and the adoption of an outcomes-based education (OBE) orientation to education and training.

Numerous accounts have been written of the origin and roots of OBE in South Africa (see for example, Jansen 1998, 1999a; Kraak 1999). Within the NQF it is a legal requirement that all curricula, irrespective of the level or provider (and including teacher education curricula), adopt an OBE orientation. Explaining how OBE emerged historically in South Africa, Jansen (1999a) writes:

The historical account emphasizes that OBE did not emerge as a coherent and comprehensive curriculum reform in South Africa; its origins lie in a number of disparate influences, both internal (for example, competency debates in labour) and external (for example, the Spady version of OBE in the United States); both historical (the apartheid legacy) and contemporary (managing the contradictory claims of reconstruction, redistribution and reconciliation); both educational (performance-based learning) and economic (globalization pressures to participate meaningfully in competitive economies). (p. 14)

This statement highlights the complexities and tensions inherent in OBE, which have tended to carry over into the national curriculum framework and to have an impact on teacher education. OBE was adopted because it was seen as providing access to education and training for many Black South Africans whose schooling had been interrupted during the boycotts and protests of the 1970s and 1980s. OBE was also seen as providing the flexibility needed for enabling a system to transform. Together with learner-centred education and integration, OBE was a key design feature of the first post-apartheid national curriculum, and it also shaped the design of teacher education policy (NDoE 2000a).

The vision of South African educational transformation has been shaped, on the one hand, by certain economic forces, particularly those linked to the need to be competitive in the global economy. On the other hand, the vision has been shaped by the need to redress the legacy of the past through the creation of democracy, social justice, and equity. How this tension manifests itself in curriculum policy is discussed in the next section.

The vision of transformation and the development of a national curriculum

The first national curriculum, Curriculum 2005 (C2005), was conceptualized and developed within the vision of educational transformation described in the White Paper on Education and Training (MOE 1995). Within the White Paper, and the subsequent adoption of an outcomes- or competency-based system in C2005, lies an enduring and uneasy tension (Gultig 2003; Mattson and Harley 2003). Gultig (2003) argues that, on the one hand, C2005 was intended as a blueprint or framework that would unite all citizens as equals in a democratic and prosperous South Africa. As a national project concerned with nurturing a new South Africa, C2005 was politically inspired and driven. On the other hand, it was intended to respond to an imperative for change driven by economic rationality and the desire to be part of a global economy.

As the National Department of Education (1997) stated in the C2005 document, the curriculum represented a radical departure from the previous curriculum in terms of its theoretical underpinnings, design features, teaching and learning processes, and assessment process. A paradigm shift was seen as necessary to normalize and transform teaching and learning in South African schools. Thus C2005 advocated a shift from a system based largely, albeit in varying degrees, on the tenets of positivist epistemology and behaviourist learning theory to one located within the ambit of constructivist epistemology and learner-centred education. Key tenets of the national curriculum are its outcomes-based design and learner-centred pedagogical approach. The latter embraces the notion of active and visible learners constructing their own knowledge, and an active but invisible teacher, whose role it is to facilitate rather than direct learning. It emphasizes a non-authoritarian classroom environment, and the importance of activity and skills as a basis for knowing and knowledge (Chisholm 2000). The attraction of this pedagogy, which is informed by a progressive educational discourse of human rights and social justice, was its emancipationist and democratic ideology. The national curriculum’s adoption of learner-centredness needs to be seen as part of a much larger national political vision and social project, one whose goals are social reconstruction, equity, and social justice.

This is essentially how Jansen (2003, p. 44) views the situation, maintaining that the state’s “internal legitimacy depends on its capacity to involve the educational rhetoric of struggle, through C2005, including the logic of participation”, while its “external legitimacy requires it to invoke the language of globalization—global connectedness and economic competitiveness”. The pressure to modernize and become part of a global community, both politically and economically, has meant that South Africa has drawn primarily on Western models for curriculum development (Lotz-Sisitka and Janse van Rensburg 2000). This is why the first post-apartheid national curriculum statement (C2005) is referred to as an “indigenized foreigner”: it is an imported model which was developed in very different societies and hybridized for South Africa’s specific needs (Harley and Parker 1999, p. 186; Popkewitz 2000, p. 5). Mattson and Harley (2003) provide a lucid account of the two competing modernist discourses contained in curriculum policy. The economic imperative, driven by the need to make South Africa competitive in a global economy, is evident in the discourse of high skills, competency, transferability, performativity, and lifelong learning. The social reconstructivist imperative is evident in the emancipatory discourse and pedagogy of policy. The two discourses make conflicting demands on education: the former leans towards a performance-geared culture driven by accountability and requiring increased state regulation and control, and the latter calls for critical thinking, participation, and the adoption of democratic values.

This situation can be traced back to the 1995 White Paper, which describes a dilemma that relates to the values and principles underpinning the vision of education. These include, inter alia, democracy (through participation), freedom (through critical and independent thought), equity (through opening access to education and ensuring quality), justice (through redress of educational inequalities), and lifelong learning. These values, evident in the curriculum (NDoE 1997) and the Norms and Standards for Educators policy (NDoE 2000b), raise two issues. First, these values, however desirable, are not innocent. As Western liberal values associated with late modernity, they infer a “universal subject” linked to certain identities and “ways of being” which policy makers assume the public, and teachers in particular, will buy into (Popkewitz 2000, p. 3). However as Mattson and Harley (2003) contend, the more profound disjuncture is between two different ways of being. They see this as the consequence of current educational change being part of a modernist project, one that necessarily involves the learner in a shift from a traditional to a modern way of being—which poses huge difficulties for many teachers, particularly rural teachers, in South Africa.

Early studies on the implementation of C2005 showed that while OBE, through C2005, was being received with great enthusiasm by teachers, the change taking place was largely superficial and procedural rather than philosophical (Jansen 1999b). Within months of the initial implementation in 1998, our attention was drawn to the problematic situation regarding the provision and nature of teacher training. There was “blind following of procedures without understanding how or why these work” and teachers’ poor conceptual knowledge of the subjects they were teaching was seen as a major constraint to curriculum work (Taylor and Vinjevold 1999, p. 160). Likewise, the Review Committee on C2005 (Chisholm 2000) found that teachers’ knowledge of C2005 was superficial: they had a “rather shallow understanding” of its principles (p. 2). Problems were also encountered because of the nature of the support and training that the state offered for teachers. The committee highlighted the inadequacy of the “cascade” model of teacher training which focuses on “thin” or procedural—that is, “how to do”—knowledge at the expense of developing teachers’ understanding of the “why”, the declarative knowledge (Chisholm 2000, p. 19).

Education policy and a national curriculum framework, however good, will not realize the government’s aspirations for transforming South Africa’s education system into a modern, high-quality, efficient education system. The development of teachers is seen as a key factor in transforming the system (DBSA 2008; Janse van Rensburg and Lotz-Sisitka 2000; OECD 2008; Wilmot 2004, 2005, 2009). However, when viewed from a position of hindsight some 17 years after the transition to democracy, it is apparent that little attention was paid to the time scale involved in the radical changes that were being advocated by the state and the contextual realities in which the transformation had to take place. Mistaken assumptions were made about the contextual reality of the school system: the majority of teachers, trained in colleges controlled by the apartheid state, lacked the knowledge and skills that the new curriculum assumed them to have. Policy makers underestimated the complexity of the contextual realities in which the transformation had to take place and the time needed to transform the system.

These issues were addressed through two curriculum review processes (in 2000 and 2005); the result is a strengthened and streamlined curriculum statement. They were also addressed through the development and implementation of in-service teacher education programmes such as the Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE). The recommendations of a third review process, which is due to be implemented in 2012, foreground disciplinary knowledge in an attempt to further strengthen the quality of teaching and learning in South African schools. This will have an impact on the design and implementation of the new pre- and in-service teacher education qualifications.

The Norms and Standards for Educators policy (NDoE 2000a) signalled the state’s intention to adopt a new non-technicist approach to teacher education. The policy adopts a competency-based approach and sets out the knowledge, skills, and values that teachers must acquire and the roles they must perform. It emphasizes practical and foundational competencies as well as the development of reflexive competences. Educators are expected to perform seven roles including mediator and assessor of learning, and developer of curriculum and learning support materials. From this one may infer a fully developed or extended professional. This policy, updated in 2006, is used as a guiding framework for initial and in-service teacher education programmes offered by university education faculties.

Implementation has not been without its difficulties. According to a recent review of policy, the framework is elaborate and very new to South Africa, and involves constructs and concepts with which teacher educators and teachers have no familiarity and experience (OECD 2008). This has provided the impetus to develop another framework of teacher education qualifications, the Policy on the Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications, which was made public in July 2011. The new policy framework signals a shift from applied competence and roles to a framework encapsulating notions of applied and integrated knowledge (NDEHT 2011, p. 9).

The discussion in this section has illuminated the difficulties and challenges that have emerged as a result of the way that educational transformation in post-apartheid South Africa was shaped by national and global imperatives for change. Our review of the literature revealed how education policy and curriculum frameworks have been shaped by modernist global and national discourses, and have been blind to the contextual realities of schools and teachers in South Africa. In the next section our focus shifts to a discussion of how, parallel and simultaneous to the changes described above, teacher education was re-structured and re-oriented in response to national and global imperatives.

National imperatives driving changes in teacher education

When the new government took over in 1994, it faced an enormous task: dismantling an inequitable, structurally inefficient, and geographically and racially fragmented apartheid teacher education system which consisted of over 281 institutions providing various forms of teacher training. It included more than 100 colleges of education. Within South Africa, 18 of these were for Whites, 16 for Coloureds, 2 for Indians, and 13 for Blacks. And a further 77 colleges were for Blacks residing in the nine “homelands” or “Bantustans” created by the apartheid government (CHE 2010). Alongside the various colleges of education, 36 universities also offered teacher training which was mostly discipline-based and post-graduate, focused on producing secondary school teachers; many also offered a four-year integrated undergraduate degree such as a Bachelor of Primary Education or Bachelor of Pedagogics (CHE 2010). Whereas universities were mainly responsible for producing secondary school teachers, colleges of education were responsible for producing primary school teachers.

The nature of college and university qualifications differed significantly. The former emphasized the development of professional skills and teaching practices and was often driven by an authoritarian and behaviourist pedagogy, whereas the latter emphasized a robust discipline knowledge base and academic skills. Furthermore, the nature and quality of a teaching qualification differed radically between White and Black institutions. The policies for Black teacher education were regulated by the apartheid state’s education ideology and its sociopolitical imperative to produce a subservient workforce. Universities have a history of academic freedom and institutional autonomy. It was against this backdrop of extreme racism, segregation and fragmentation, inequity, duplication, and inefficiency that the post-1994 government set about addressing the immense challenge of restructuring and transforming the teacher education system into an equitable, non-sexist, non-racial, democratic system.

One of the first structural changes to be made was more centralized control over the direction and nature of teacher education colleges, which were all incorporated into the nationally controlled higher education sector (HSRC 2008). Over a very short period of time universities thus became the custodians and drivers of all teacher education in South Africa. This was also seen as consistent with a global trend to modernize teacher education by incorporating it into universities. While they were absorbing colleges, the universities themselves also experienced a complex process of restructuring and rationalization through mergers.

The National Policy for Higher Education (NDoE 2000b) provided the implementation framework for transforming the higher education system and reducing the number of higher education institutions (HEIs). This restructuring was driven by several factors: the national imperative for change, the need for a socially just and equitable distribution of resources and opportunities, and the need to make the system more productive by effectively and efficiently meeting the country’s teaching, research, and skills development needs (OECD 2008). The restructuring process was complicated by global imperatives and the pressure to expand and diversify the types of enrolment and institutions, along with fiscal pressure, the resultant search for market sources of revenue, the demand for greater accountability, and the demand for quality and efficiency (HSRC 2008). Increasingly, as universities responded to external global demands, they became more managerial, bureaucratic, and entrepreneurial, and less collegial, and they developed an explicit corporate culture. These and other, often negative, consequences of merging several institutions had an impact on the entire higher education landscape (CHE 2010).

By 2004, the number of HEIs—university education faculties, schools, and departments—had decreased from 36 to 23. This was seen as necessary to create a more streamlined and efficient system. However, some believe this process compromised the status of teacher education within the university sector (HSRC 2008), with teacher education being seen as the “step-child of higher education rather than a high priority academic field in its own right” (Welch and Gultig, cited in CHE 2010, p. 14). The situation was further compromised by a national funding formula for subsidizing higher education that placed teacher education in the lowest possible subsidy category (CHE 2010).

The national agenda for social reconstructivism, which encompasses the priorities of redress, social justice, and equity, provided the rationale for the structural changes to the teacher education system outlined above. Exciting as it is to have changed from the often substandard teacher training colleges to universities and a more equitable system of teacher training, the transition was not without its problems. According to the roadmap of the Development Bank of South Africa (DBSA 2008, p. 27), the number of teachers graduating per year has dropped remarkably, from 70,000 in 1994 to 6,000 in 2006. Teacher production is a serious issue in South Africa, and the Department of Higher Education and Training (NDHET) is actively engaged in resolving it, in collaboration with universities. A state-funded Fundsa Lushaka bursary scheme for teachers has also been introduced. Other challenges linked to globalization and economic rationalism have also arisen.

Under apartheid, the majority of teachers (that is, Black teachers) were trained in colleges; now the responsibility for initial teacher training for all South Africans falls on education departments at universities around the country. In the apartheid era, the majority of teachers became qualified with a two- or three-year diploma; now they need four years. What raised the bar was the need to modernize and align teaching qualifications with global trends, coupled with the ascendancy of competency-based discourse as the dominant global education discourse. Now teachers must either complete a four-year Bachelor of Education degree or “cap” an appropriate bachelor’s degree with a one-year Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) in order to become qualified. The minimum entry requirement of a bachelor’s degree for the teaching profession is intended to resolve issues of quality in the system. The extent to which this goal has been achieved in practice, some 17 years after democracy, is our focus in the next section.

Market-driven global forces evident in the discourse of standards-based education reform, along with standards-setting bodies to monitor performativity and quality assurance, have shaped teacher education since 1994. Because of our past, the unevenness and variation in the quality of teacher education qualifications on offer at the various HEIs is an ongoing challenge. Policy developments in the late 1990s signalled a shift to an era of increased state control through quality assurance mechanisms. To date, the most significant is the national Review of Teacher Education programmes in 2005 to 2007, an initiative driven by the Council on Higher Education (CHE), the quality assurance council for higher education and training qualifications. Wragg (2001) contends that assessment (in this case evaluation) becomes a political issue when the ruling party tries to defend or establish its record; this point has relevance in South Africa. If we accept Wragg’s view, then the current model of quality control in teacher education may be viewed as an instrument of state reform monitoring or system management, which is linked to powerful global discourses of performativity, efficiency, and accountability. Although the CHE’s model of review, peer evaluation by external examiners, is a participatory peer review process, it can also be seen as a powerful lever for influencing educational transformation driven by economic and political rationalities, in addition to being a mechanism of quality control to ensure that public money has been well spent.

In this section we have explained how social reconstructivism and global market forces have affected teacher education, driving a restructuring process and the development of state-initiated and state-driven quality assurance bodies and processes. These imperatives for change, together with the enormous backlog of underqualified teachers (mostly Black teachers who trained before 1994), have resulted in university education faculties offering more in-service teacher education courses. In the next section we discuss in-service teacher education programmes, especially the Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) which was developed for the purpose of re-skilling or “up-skilling” in specialized areas of need. We then discuss the Bachelor of Education, a four-year initial teacher education qualification and the Post Graduate Certificate in Education, a one-year postgraduate teaching qualification.

National and global forces shaping post-1994 teacher education qualifications

The National Education Policy Investigation (NEPI), conducted before the transformation in 1994, noted that the greatest teacher education challenge is in in-service as opposed to initial teacher education (CHE 2010). In spite of extensive interventions to address the problem of teachers’ poor subject and professional competence, by the late 1990s the system still had some 67,000 underqualified teachers. In order to address this, the Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) qualification was developed. It allows teachers to upgrade and convert their three-year qualification into the required four-year qualification. The ACE is usually offered as a two-year part-time programme in either a contact or distance modality or a combination of the two.

The in-service context in South Africa is, however, very complex, involving a triadic problematic. In-service work addresses three often conflicting imperatives: it is about access to higher education; it has to be about improving pedagogical knowledge and skills, and it offers teachers an opportunity to reskill themselves in a new discipline or area of the curriculum (CHE 2010, p. 105). Although these imperatives appear to be in conflict, the participants are often the same and hence the ACE has to address all three simultaneously. The design of ACE courses therefore requires innovative and complex conceptualization if it is to be sensitive to the triadic nature of such a qualification.

Teacher education policy (NDoE 2000a) stipulates what the ACE must provide:

[…] further specialized subject/learning area/discipline/phase competence, or a new subject specialization in one or more of the roles as an advanced study intended to “cap” an initial or general teaching qualification. Through this qualification learners will be prepared to embark on a course of study at NQF level 7. It must, therefore, include appropriate demands in terms of rigour. (p. 11)

Further, the Norms and Standards for Educators policy (NDoE 2000a) requires the ACE to produce practical, foundational, and reflexive competence.

The National Review of Academic and Professional Programmes in Education (CHE 2010) identified a number of problems and challenges with the ACE qualification. First, the Norms and Standards policy did not provide sufficient guidelines on what the areas of specialization for the ACE programme should be; this opened the door to a proliferation of ACE qualifications across the country. When the ACE programme was reviewed in 2006–2008, there were 69 different ACEs in the country and over 290 specializations being offered (CHE 2010). Second, the review found that universities were struggling to meet the conceptual demands of the ACE programme and that few institutions had found an appropriate balance between developing teachers’ pedagogic skills on the one hand, and their discipline knowledge skills on the other.

The Bachelor of Education (BEd) is a four-year undergraduate professional degree programme whose main aim is to prepare teachers to teach in formal schooling situations (CHE 2010). The design and structure of this degree is comparable to professional degrees in other fields such as accountancy, social work, journalism, and engineering. As with all the other teacher education programmes, the regulatory framework for the BEd is the Norms and Standards for Educators (NDoE 2000a). It stipulates that the BEd will equip the student to:

[…] have a strong practical and foundational competence with the reflexive competence to make judgements in a wide context. The qualification is intended for candidates seeking a focussed teaching degree with strong subject and educational theory competence. (p. 12)

Further, an effective BEd programme should ensure a healthy balance between academic imperatives and work-based learning (the school-based teaching practice). It will also seek to develop effective reflective skills and include both generalist and specialist aspects of competence (CHE 2010). The review found that numerous constraints are affecting the effective delivery of this programme and that many fundamental problems need to be addressed. Among these are recruitment, especially the need for appropriate strategies to recruit students whose profiles represent the cultural and linguistic profiles of learners; resource shortages and the persistence of apartheid inequalities in resources across institutions; and the problem of adjustment facing faculty members who have moved across from the former colleges of education. Many of these teacher educators are struggling to re-orient themselves and align their theoretical perspectives and practices with those advocated by the national curriculum, and they face a challenge in the emphasis on postgraduate teaching and supervision, and on scholarly activity and publication (CHE 2010). In spite of the restructuring and a more equitable distribution of resources, an unevenness of quality is still evident in the BEd programmes, in terms of both academic appropriateness and contextual responsiveness.

The Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) is an initial teacher qualification that “caps” an undergraduate bachelor’s degree. The PGCE is typically offered as a one-year full-time course or a two-year part-time programme. The programme is typically built around three pillars. Broadly speaking, the first of these focuses on developing pedagogical skills in specialist fields such as mathematics in the case of the secondary PGCE, or more generalist subject areas such as social sciences in the case of the primary PGCE. The second pillar focuses on teaching practice and involves set periods of internships in schools, while the third pillar contextualizes practice and content within educational theories and discourses. Students entering the PGCE programme are assumed to be proficient in discipline knowledge, having acquired it as part of their undergraduate bachelor’s degree.

The PGCE has a long history in South Africa and has traditionally produced secondary school teachers. With the implementation of the Norms and Standards policy (NDoE 2000a) and the restructuring and merging of HEIs, provision was made for PGCE programmes to also produce teachers for the Intermediate Phase (grades 4–6) and Foundation Phase (grades 1–3).

The national review of programmes (CHE 2010) found great variation in the quality of the PGCE programme across institutions. Thirteen of the 22 PGCE programmes reviewed did not meet the minimum requirements for programme design, from which one may infer significant weaknesses in teaching and learning and in assessment. Shortcomings were also noted in teaching practice. The CHE report observes that “this variance in quality is largely a reflection of South Africa’s history in the sense that inequalities of the apartheid era continue to be reproduced in teacher education programmes of the present” (CHE 2010, p. 65). This observation is borne out by the fact that those PGCE programmes that received full accreditation after the 2006–2007 CHE review were mainly located in historically advantaged universities. The CHE (2010) explains:

[…] these variances in programme quality cannot simply be ascribed to differences in material resources, but perhaps, to longstanding traditions of scholarship and familiarity with but also critical engagement with state regulatory frameworks by those universities that received full accreditation as opposed to those who adopted these frameworks rigidly as curricula with little or no reference to the literature or models of teacher education. (p. 66)

On a more positive note, the reviewers noted that “good quality PGCE programmes exist” and that they “achieve the aims of the programme as accepted internationally, and simultaneously respond to the specific context and history of South Africa’s education system” (CHE 2010, p. 66). This finding brings with it a new set of challenges. Internationalization in teacher education was facilitated by the adoption of the global discourse of competency-based education and training and the NQF, both of which make teachers’ qualifications comparable and portable. Now South African teachers—notably those who have successfully completed an internationally recognized PGCE—are becoming sought after in many other national contexts. This is especially true for the graduates of institutions that have gained international credibility for their high-quality PGCE programmes. On the one hand, the transferability of qualifications has enabled young South Africans to become part of a global community of teachers in places as far afield as South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, and the UK. On the other hand it has contributed to the brain drain in a South Africa that faces a chronic skills shortage. The exodus of young, newly well-qualified teachers to greener pastures where they can earn dollars or pounds is a concern that should not be taken lightly, especially when one considers that an estimated 12.7% of current South African teachers are HIV positive.

Since 2003 there has been a steady increase in PGCE enrolment. However, the low overall number of PGCE graduates, especially Black graduates, is a serious concern. Of the 2,100 PGCEs awarded in 2006, almost 50% went to White graduates, the majority of whom are unlikely to teach in township schools and deeply rural schools where the teacher shortage is the most acute (CHE 2010). Furthermore, aggressive overseas teacher recruitment agencies are contributing to the brain drain, militating against a transformative vision of developing human capital and alleviating poverty. Young PGCE-qualified teachers, the first generation of teachers educated in a non-racial democratic South Africa, do not carry the baggage of a divided and unequal past. They are potentially the most effective agents of change in South African schools. Ironically, internationalization in the form of competency-based education with its notions of portable and transferable skills, has provided them with access to global markets—and is thus undermining the state’s social reconstructivist vision of transformation.

Despite the restructuring of teacher education by incorporating colleges of teacher training into universities and merging various HEIs, and the many innovations in in-service teacher education programmes and the introduction of the Fundza Lushaka bursary scheme, teacher production continues to be a serious challenge. At the beginning of 2010, the Department of Higher Education presented the issues facing teacher education in South Africa to all institutions offering teacher education. The message was clear: South Africa needs more teachers and better teachers. The quantity and the quality of the teachers being produced are both critical issues facing South African education. The issue of quantity is especially evident in the Foundation Phase (grades 1–3) where the system is currently producing about a quarter to a third of the teachers it needs. As Barber and Mourshed (2007, p. 7) write, “the quality of an education cannot exceed the quality of its teachers”. Strategies to address the situation have been developed. They include an ambitious National Teacher Development Plan, a new Teacher Qualifications Policy, and the Foundation Phase Teacher Education Project, supported by the Department of Higher Education and the European Union.

The latter initiative, which began in 2011, is intended to strengthen the capacity of the higher education system to provide more and better Foundation Phase (FP) teachers. Funded by a grant of R156 million (€ 15,160,000) from the European Union, nine research programmes have been launched across 14 universities. This three-year initiative focuses on three specific areas of identified need. It aims to increase the number of HEIs offering FP programmes, particularly for teaching in the vernacular; to strengthen already existing FP programmes; and to change the image of FP teaching and the status of FP teachers.

Furthermore, the Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications (NDHET 2011), described earlier, which was published in July of 2011, sets out the new framework for teacher qualifications. The new policy is based on a philosophy and principles that are different from the current policy stated in the Norms and Standards for Educators (NDoE 2000a). With the exception of master’s and doctoral degrees in education, most other teacher education qualifications will require a new curriculum design to be compliant with the new policy.

These recent initiatives illustrate how the state, the private sector, and the universities are working actively and collaboratively to resolve the issues faced in teacher education almost two decades after the demise of apartheid.

Conclusions

In this article we have described the broader context of transformation in which teacher education in South Africa is embedded. We focused on a key element of transformation: a vision of transformation linked to a larger state modernizing project that is driven by two powerful and competing modernist imperatives for change. We explained how an axis of tension was created, on the one hand, by a national agenda of social reconstruction encompassing redress, equity, social justice, active participation, and democracy, and on the other hand, by transformation that has been shaped by a global imperative for change, which is underpinned by economic instrumentalism: the need to alleviate poverty and unemployment and produce globally competitive workers. The latter is linked to global markets and manifests itself in discourses of regulation, quality control, accountability, re-skilling, and lifelong learning.

A vision for transformation, characterized by competing discourses, has resulted in structural change at all levels of education and training, including schooling and teacher education, and it has shaped the national curriculum framework. The restructuring of teacher education has not been without its challenges and difficulties, especially because the state is in transition and its education environment is often unstable and fluid. The first national review of teacher education reveals how national and global imperatives for change have shaped the nature and type of teacher education qualifications offered in post-apartheid South Africa. The development of the NQF and the adoption of an outcomes-based orientation to education and training at all levels of the system have facilitated standards setting, international comparability, and the portability of qualifications. It has also provided flexibility and access, and heralded in a new era of accountability and increased state regulation through the creation of quality assurance councils and the implementation of a nationwide, state-initiated peer review of teacher education qualifications. An unintended outcome of internationalization in teacher education has been the increased marketability of newly qualified South African teachers.

Importantly, in navigating as we have within the axes of tension caused by the competing modernist imperatives driving educational transformation in South Africa, we have learned valuable lessons about change. The most important insight we have gleaned is that change is a complex, ongoing, and dynamic social process. In spite of what South Africa has achieved since 1994, we are acutely aware of how much still has to be done. In the context of teacher education, the critical issues of quality and quantity are being addressed.