What will the new advisor to the minister of higher education and training do on a daily basis?
‘I don’t know exactly, but I think the position entails attending a lot of ministerial meetings and doing lots of research about the sector,” says John Pampallis, newly appointed advisor to Minister of Higher Education and Training Blade Nzimande. Pampallis is no stranger to the national education discourse.
As the director of the Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD), an education think tank, a position he has held since 1996, he has long been influential in shaping government policies on education.
His work includes the supervision of and participation in research on various areas of education policy, such as curriculum, school governance, private schooling, teacher education and capacity building of higher education institutions.
Prior to this, Pampallis taught at schools and lectured at universities in South Africa and abroad. Nzimande and Pampallis have had a long working relationship as the new minister has been a member of the CEPD’s board of trustees.
Pampallis, who officially takes up office as advisor to Nzimande on July 1, has already marked his concerns about the state of higher education and training.
One of them is what he believes to be the lack of focus by previous education ministries, which hampered attention to specific issues. ‘In the context of the new ministry, there needs to be an understanding of what the ministry is and what it does … to give it more coherence,” he says.
But crucial to Pampallis is the poor level of skills development and the retaining of skilled personnel in the country, as well as the efficiency of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS). ‘At the moment the human resource aspect is lacking.
We need to focus on getting more skilled people and find effective ways of retaining them.” Pampallis is positive that the ongoing review process of the NSFAS would help in developing methods to distribute funds to needy students.