The days of bogus private further education and training (FET) colleges operating without meeting the necessary legal requirements are numbered, according to the department of education.
This is a development that most parents and stakeholders in education would applaud. For some time now, many illiterate and poor parents have lost thousands of rands, particularly at this time of the year, to unscrupulous providers who close down after a few months or offer courses of inferior quality.
The department has always insisted that it is parents’ responsibility to verify the status of any institution before they enrol their children. It recently ran adverts in various newspapers reminding parents to exercise vigilance in this regard.
The department’s director of private colleges, Bheki Mahlobo, said all private colleges offering FET programmes are currently operating ‘in terms of transitional arrangements” until December 2007. As such, he said, ‘the department cannot intervene in their manner of operation” until January next year.
Said Mahlobo: ‘The department cannot intervene on matters related to the contractual arrangement between students or parents and the college since it was not party to the agreement. In terms of the law of contract, only those parties that concluded the contract can sue for breach of contract.”
Umalusi, a departmental body that accredits programmes offered by FET colleges and should be cracking down on these errant institutions, currently lacks the legal teeth to deal with them. It is this loophole that the providers seem to be exploiting.
Umalusi spokesperson Jabu Maphalala said registration, which is the responsibility of the education department, was not at this stage a compulsory requirement for private institutions.
Many of them operated before they were required to register with the department. Maphalala said that because of this, many institutions applied for accreditation before registering with the department.
Some of these colleges, which were not registered with the department, sprung up in the Nineties offering matric courses and diplomas in tourism, business management, marketing and secretarial courses.
Maphalala said the only punitive measure Umalusi is able to impose on rogue providers is to ‘withdraw their accreditation if there was a serious breach of compliance requirements”. Furthermore, it would recommend to the department that the latter de-register the provider.
The fact that these providers can be accredited by Umalusi but not register with the department is one of the reasons parents are unable to establish the authenticity of the institutions.
Although the department says that the landscape is certainly set to change within the FET sector, it is not clear what the consequences will be for illegal providers.
Representatives of other role players in education agreed that parents must get involved in verifying the status of institutions at which they enrol their children.
But they added that until then the department must intervene more meaningfully on behalf of the affected parents and, more importantly, such intervention should be backed up by sustained education to empower them.
John Lewis, of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, said the department must go beyond warning parents and ensure it intervenes decisively. For instance, ‘If they [the department] do not have the powers [to act] then they must get them. They should not just say it is parents’ responsibility,” he said.
Spokespersons for the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa) and the Governors’ Alliance, a coalition of school governing bodies, echoed Lewis’s views.
Naptosa’s president, Dave Balt, described the situation as a ‘tragic one” and called for a vigorous ‘advocacy campaign”. He sympathised with the department’s difficulties in reining in the sham institutions.
‘The critical factor for us is to try to educate parents and the community, so that when they register they know the school is supported by the department,” said Balt.
Cathy Callaghan, of Governors’ Alliance, also called for sustained education that would use popular media such as radio to reach illiterate parents. ‘I think the education departments, both national and provincial, should make a list of those schools and publish it in the media — especially on radio for those parents who are illiterate,” said Callaghan.
Articles in the Teacher in the past have highlighted the complexity of the verification process, especially for ordinary parents. The stories revealed the cunning methods used by providers to capitalise on existing legal loopholes.
Glossy brochures written in polished and sophisticated language have become effective marketing tools to dupe gullible parents. For instance, the providers:
- market courses for which they are not accredited;
- conceal the band at which the programme is pitched in terms of the National Qualification Framework;
- register their operations as businesses in order to comply with the Companies Registration Act, and not with the relevant educational bodies; and
- withhold information from students about the duration of their programmes.
It is hoped the envisaged regulation will ensure that providers do not cut corners but play according to the rules and thereby contribute to providing quality and accessible education for all.