Unlocking undergraduate access to higher education: Recognition of prior learning in South Africa

Abstract This research note presents the University of the Western Cape’s Portfolio Development Hybrid Programme (PDHP) as a nationally recognised, pedagogically grounded model of recognition of prior learning (RPL) for undergraduate access in South Africa. Designed to enable adult learners – many without formal qualifications or with marginalised knowledge backgrounds – to enter and succeed in higher education, PDHP combines values-based curriculum design with transformative pedagogies rooted in adult learning, epistemic justice and care. Drawing on five years of longitudinal data (2020–2024) and more than two decades of institutional implementation, the study illustrates how RPL can evolve from a once-off assessment mechanism into a sustained teaching-and-learning intervention that builds academic readiness and social mobility within the adult learning context. The findings demonstrate the programme’s success in facilitating academic access for over 400 learners in the past five years and more than 900 since inception, as well as its responsiveness to digital exclusion and institutional constraints, and its alignment with the fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 4) in terms of inclusive education. By theorising RPL through the institution’s framework of innovative, digital, equitable, accessible and lifelong recognition of prior learning (IDEAL-RPL), the research note explains the underlying pedagogical mechanisms – care, scaffolding, digital empowerment and reflexivity – that enable adult learners to thrive and persist at university. It further situates PDHP within the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) discourse, offering evidence of how inclusive curriculum design and hybrid pedagogies contribute to equity, transformation and sustainability in higher education. PDHP challenges dominant, compliance-oriented RPL models by repositioning recognition as a pedagogical and relational process that fosters confidence, capability and lifelong learning. Framed within global debates on education for sustainable development, it offers a scalable and replicable approach to widening participation and transforming institutional cultures towards justice, inclusion and sustainability.