Blade Nzimande’s portfolio is a very comprehensive and complex one. Not only public institutions but also private institutions need to be considered here.
Not many people realise that there are more registered private than public higher education institutions, with more learners than in the public sector. Then, of course, there are the further education and training (FET) colleges, the private colleges and the thousands of (mostly small) private training institutions accredited by the sector education and training authorities (Setas). The mind boggles.
On Thursday May 14 the news broke that the entire skills development division of the department of labour would be moved to the new department of higher education and training.
The recently revised education and training legislation makes provision for the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) to be divided into three quality zones. These are general and further education, higher education and occupational education and training. Each of these zones has its own quality council.
To oversee the Seta landscape in itself is not an easy task, as the labour minister will be able to attest. Yes, the previous department of education was very large and complex, but this new government structure for education is also very large and much more complex.
Of course, Nzimande has a higher education background and will understand what he is letting himself in for. Having been active in the trade union movement, as well as in the South African Communist Party, he will have a good understanding of skills and occupational needs in the country.
If you consider the many complex problems that face each of these sectors, you get a good idea of what the minister and his officials will be up against in the next five years:
- In higher education there is the matter of school leavers not being able to cope with university studies, racism on university campuses, overpaid vice-chancellors and dismal throughput of learners from first year to graduation.
- In the FET colleges we have even worse throughputs of learners. This leads to the FET colleges being told to take in grade 12 learners only. There is also a lack of suitably qualified teachers, chaos left by badly managed mergers and a mismatch between the needs of the industry and the new FET curriculum.
- In skills development there are more underperforming and corrupt Setas than we like to admit, skills shortages, surplus money not used for training and a whole new system ready to be set up and implemented. Hopefully the new minister will agree broadly with the idea of a quality body for trades and occupation.
If the systems are taken over as is, there are three quality councils involved in this portfolio. These are the Council on Higher Education (CHE) for tertiary institutions, Umalusi for schools and FET colleges, and the Quality Council for Trades and Occupations (QCTO) for occupational learning.
The QCTO does not exist yet and the big question on everybody’s minds is: will Nzimande set up the QCTO, or will he ask the CHE to look after trades and occupations? In addition, it might be a good idea to take another look at the need for both a vocational system and an occupational system, or at least to make them talk to each other.
The CHE has been functioning since the inception of the NQF. Its higher education quality committee uses peer assessment in making its assessments and it has been functioning well.
But one area where it did not succeed was in the evaluation of private training institutions that were expected to live up to university standards. Training institutions do not need to do research and have sophisticated media centres to do good training.
Umalusi is charged with the quality assurance of public and private schools and FET colleges. This quality council has thus far concentrated on the monitoring and control of the exit-level examinations. It admits that it does not have the capacity to do site visits of public and private colleges. Its quality assurance is basically a paper exercise. FET colleges still fall under provincial government, so there must be centralisation to a national level.
Mariétta van Rooyen served on the South African Qualifications Authority board for eight years and is a board member of the SA Board for Personnel Practices. She is the executive chairperson of the Assessment College of South Africa