BRIDGING POLICY AND PRACTICE: A PROPOSAL FOR RPL RUBRIC REFORM AND OVERHAUL OF THE NATIONAL LEARNERS' RECORDS DATABASE (NLRD)

This policy concept paper is part of an ongoing national conversation on how South Africa recognises diverse forms of knowledge within its education and training system. It argues that Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL), once a mechanism of redress, must now evolve into a strategic instrument of social and cognitive justice that values knowledge derived from practice alongside formal academic production. Drawing on more than two decades of leadership, training, and system development experience, the author identifies major weaknesses within the existing RPL ecosystem. Chief among these are: Evaluation inequity—where practitioners are measured by academic publication standards rather than practical results; Data fragmentation—where accredited learning achievements, even those under Eskom College, City Power, the University of Pretoria, and SABS, remain absent from the National Learners’ Records Database (NLRD); and Institutional misalignment—where Quality Councils apply inconsistent criteria, leaving most workplace and community learning invisible in official statistics. The paper calls for the creation of a dual evaluation rubric: an Academic Rubric for traditional research pathways, and a Practice-and-Results Rubric that evaluates competence through applied leadership, indigenous continuity, creative innovation, mentorship, environmental stewardship, and measurable community impact. This approach operationalises the vision of the DHET White Paper for Post-School Education and Training (2013) to “broaden access through alternative pathways.” It also gives practical effect to Shiv Visvanathan’s (2009) principle of cognitive justice—the right to different ways of knowing—and Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s (2014) claim that there is no social justice without cognitive justice. To complement this theoretical shift, the paper introduces the SmartBridge™ open-source digital governance framework as a policy laboratory. SmartBridge™ demonstrates how learner evidence, RPL decisions, and appeals can be digitally captured, verified, and audited across institutions using open credential standards such as Open Badges, Comprehensive Learner Record, and W3C Verifiable Credentials. This model aims to transform fragmented record-keeping into a transparent, traceable, and equitable national data ecosystem that finally links practice to policy. The paper forms part of the author’s broader research trajectory as an RPL practitioner and systems innovator, intersecting leadership, education policy, and digital governance. It will underpin a forthcoming Parliamentary submission to the Portfolio Committee on Higher Education, Science and Innovation, advocating for the inclusion of practitioner voices in the design of new RPL evaluation rubrics and the re-engineering of the NLRD. This record is uploaded under embargo for provenance and intellectual protection. The DOI date establishes authorship while full public release will follow after stakeholder consultation. Readers are invited to reference this work as a foundation for ongoing dialogue on epistemic justice, indigenous knowledge recognition, and open-governance reform in South Africa’s higher-education landscape.