RECOGNITION OF PRIOR LEARNING (RPL) AND SUPPORT: ARE THE LEARNING NEEDS OF RPL FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS DIFFERENT?

Abstract

RPL was first established in the United States during the late 1960s and was initially used in
their formal education and training sector (Dyson & Keating, 2005). Certain international
higher education institutions (HEIs) have been using Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) for
more than 30 years, particularly in the USA, Canada, Northern Ireland, Britain and Australia
(Gawe cited in Moore & Van Rooyen, 2002; Geyser, 2001). The origins of RPL in South
Africa can be traced to several projects and policy-making structures established by the trade
union movement and the ANC in the struggle for liberation in the late 1980s (SAQA, 2002:9).
RPL was placed on the South African educational agenda in the early 1990s prior to the birth of
South Africa’s new democracy (Breier, 2007). Its establishment was strongly motivated by the
trade union movement, for example, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU),
to recognise the knowledge and skills of millions of previously disadvantaged workers and the
movement fought for the rights of workers to gain access to HEIs to improve their chances of
promotion and employment. In this context RPL was seen as a mechanism to redress sociopolitical
imbalances of the past (Cretchley & Castle, 2001). The proliferation of RPL into HEIs,
globally and locally, suggests that using only traditional access as the indicator for access to
HEIs and success is “inadequate and outdated” (Kistan, 2002:171).