Secondary Vocational Education in South Africa: Can We Learn From Portugal?

The economy of Europe, and Portugal in particular, is doing well, with tourism as the driver! The same tourism-phenomenon took place in South Africa after the end of apartheid in 1994. However, despite tourism programmes being accredited in both countries, there exists a perceived problem in South Africa, not shared in Portugal, that the vocational programmes do not meet the specific needs on the tourism industry. Therefore, by introducing vocational tourism education, both Portugal and South Africa needed to use this specific system to respond to identified shortages of occupational skills within the Portuguese, and definitely the South African, labour markets. The National Certificate Vocational (NCV) tourism programme was introduced in 2007 at Technical, Vocational Education, and Training colleges (TVET) in South Africa. This study specifically chose Portugal because the secondary vocational system, reintroduced in that country in 1983 after almost completely disappearing for a decade and a half (after the abolition of technical education), is proving to be a viable alternative to "formal' education, certainly in combating unemployment in the tourism sector. The secondary education curriculum in Portugal was reformed in 2004, creating technological courses, which facilitated integration into the employment market. The initial South African research (2014-2017) compared vocational education in South Africa to other European countries (specifically Switzerland and Germany), identifying the need for a properly administered and controlled dual vocational education system in South Africa, as is currently followed in Portugal. This paper focuses on how the present NCV tourism programme in TVET colleges in South Africa may be improved by following the present Portuguese vocational education model. The NCV tourism programme was designed to provide both theoretical and practical knowledge of the tourism industry in South Africa, aiming to improve the employment possibilities for NCV tourism in graduates in the wider tourism labour market in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. This paper also supports the notion that an updated NCV tourism programme could learn from the Portuguese system on how to apply vocational tourism education, by including more practical and structured industry exposure. A literature review established that Portugal's secondary vocational education is thriving and their primary goal is the development of young employees' vocational training, which allows the development of specific skills indispensable to an occupation, such as tourism, as can be seen in the breakdown of the programmes discussed in the 'results' section. The original research on the NCV tourism programme was conducted in the Western Cape in the form of an empirical survey to gather information using research questionnaires, and this paper proposes the use of both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, to also include a comparison on the guidelines, investments and results on the Portuguese and the South African experience on the last years.