Page 40 - Education Supplement August 2025

From Learnership to Leadership:

Changing the Mindset of

South Africa’s

Youth

South Africa has no shortage of bright young minds.

What it often lacks is a system that knows what to do with them.

or decades, the education and training pipeline The Learnership Trap
has worked like a conveyor belt: school, matric, Founder Kathy Ramsewak has spent years watching how
Funiversity – then, if you’re lucky, maybe a the learnership model, in its current form, often fails the very
job. But for thousands of South African learners, people it’s meant to serve. Instead of building careers, it has
that path has never made sense. Not everyone is become a revolving door of stipends with no real destination
wired for academics. Not everyone is destined for in sight.
a degree. And for many, life circumstances make
university more of a pipe dream than a plan. Young people move from programme to programme, signing
up for multiple learnerships, collecting payments, and staying
This is where Advanced Assessments steps in. in a loop that looks like progress but never really is. It’s a
system designed to keep them busy, not to set them free.
The mission here is not about ticking boxes. It’s
about dismantling the barriers that keep young “We’re not here to trap kids in the system,” Kathy says. “Our
people trapped in survival mode, and creating real mission is to change the system. We want learnerships to
pathways to growth. become stepping stones – not cul-de-sacs.”

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