 To find out how that process took place and what happened to the curriculum focus of people's education from the struggle years of the mid-1980s, we spoke to Andre Krug, a research director at the Human Sciences Research Council. In the period prior to 8990, we had a very radical, left-wing, radical discourse shaping the notions of a changed curriculum and the constituency that was trying to address was the working people, black people but also poor people. It was consciously trying to address issues of poverty and inequality. You then have the rise of a very different discourse, an argument coming mainly from the trade union movement who are now being challenged to put forward alternative economic policies and a key component of that would be human resource development training and they look to world models and proposed initially this notion of an integrated education training system. In the early 90s, you have a decline in the status of people's education as a radical discourse that is inappropriate for the post-1990 period and you have the rise of another discourse from another radical group, the trade union movement, which is much more reformist. Its project is to find alternative economic policies to take South Africa back successfully back into the world economy. I think the two theories are on the demise of people's education since 1990. The one theory is that people's education went into decline because it was populist, it was thin on detail, it was hot on emotive radical content but that it didn't really give us a programme of action on how to run schools in a different way, textbooks, the training of professional teachers, school management and so forth. And that's the one theory I personally think is the correct one. The other is a more angry view that people's education was abandoned. It was sold out by the reformism of the post-1990, especially the post-94 period. And I think that's an unfortunate view that doesn't take into account the difficulties of transition of managing and being part of negotiated change. I don't think it's a question that they were abandoned in the same way as the first few which saw people's education usually quite thin, unsubstantial, undeveloped. They had very little substance. I think the other thing that also happens which is the more dominant view is that the government officials began to rely more on external expertise and less on internal and participatory expertise and that definitely is a trend. But again, if one thinks realistically about how a government and its officials should function, there's probably a necessary exercise to getting expertise and we're thin. We were thin then on a lot of expertise. So you have the impact of New Zealand, Australian, latest Scottish English experts who are still working in the country in a range of areas. And our policies were in the idea of an integrated and single system of education were strongly shaped by the New Zealand, Australian, English, Scottish versions of that model. And in that period of about 18 months between 1994 and 1996, I think there was a very noticeable shift away from the earlier, more general expressions around an integrated system of education and training which theoretically should have actually been driven by a single department of education and training to a program of a department of education acting on its own looking at outcomes-based education which was manifested in the program curriculum 2005. The more important influence is that a form of outcomes-based education was being practiced in industry in the form of competency models since 1985 and industry was very, very keen on having this narrowed version of outcomes-based education implemented. So you had a lot of enthusiasm from business and in the era of negotiation that's a positive development. You have a lot of enthusiasm now from the trade union movement and so the departmental officials I think moved with this momentum. I've always been perplexed why educationalists didn't have a stronger voice and I think it's because even though many people complain about outcomes-based education as well as the system model, the integrated education and training model no alternative, no strongly curriculum-driven alternative was ever put on the table since people's education so that it is interesting why a more curriculum-driven movement did not start in 1990 in the democratic period which took further the ideas of people's education. So instead of having a very strongly curriculum and a pedagogical and education-driven response you have outcomes-based education. So we have moved quite rapidly during the 1990s from the concern for equality in people's education through a concern for equality in the form of a system which integrates education and training to outcomes-based education.