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

RPL was first established in the United States during the late 1960s and was initially used intheir formal education and training sector (Dyson & Keating, 2005). Certain internationalhigher education institutions (HEIs) have been using Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) formore 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 SouthAfrica can be traced to several projects and policy-making structures established by the tradeunion 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 ofSouth Africa’s new democracy (Breier, 2007). Its establishment was strongly motivated by thetrade 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 themovement fought for the rights of workers to gain access to HEIs to improve their chances ofpromotion and employment. In this context RPL was seen as a mechanism to redress sociopoliticalimbalances 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locally, suggests that using only traditional access as the indicator for access toHEIs and success is “inadequate and outdated” (Kistan, 2002:171)