The CHE shares its plans and priorities — and sparks off a debate
Established as an independent statutory body in May 1998 in terms of the Higher Education Act of the previous year, the Council on Higher Education (CHE) is essentially South Africa’s quality council for higher education.
And it was that basic issue of quality that sparked a fiery debate towards the end of the session. Not a dispute about the quality standards of South African higher education institutions, but one about the process, that is, who determines quality along the way.
The talk started off with an explanation of what the CHE is about and where it fits into the state hierarchy.
Prof Narend Baijnath, CEO of the CHE, said he had drawn quite heavily on the post-school education and training (PSET) plan, insofar as it influenced and impacted on the work of the CHE.
The government’s PSET plan was the topic of a plenary the following day, presented by Dr Diane Parker, Deputy Director General for the Department of Higher Education and Training. Dr Parker outlined how PSET was first published as a White Paper in 2014 and the final draft finalised in March this year.
Caption: Prof Narend Baijnath, CEO of the Council on Higher Education.
Prof Baijnath said this made it a critical time for them as the Ministry’s plan on paper becomes the agenda for the next few years.
What the CHE does
The Council’s mandate in terms of the Higher Education Act has four key elements:
- To advise the minister responsible for Higher Education and Training on higher education matters – which could be any matter, upon his request on upon the initiative of the CHE, ”and often it’s a mixture of those two”, he said;
- To audit the quality assurance mechanisms of higher education institutions, both public and private, and accredit their programmes;
- To monitor the higher education system and publish information about its developments; and
- To organise and host conferences on higher education themes (the next one is in February, on the theme, Enhancing Academic Success through the Involvement of Students in Quality Assurance and Promotion in Higher Education).
The CHE and confidentiality
The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee for Higher Education and Training can ask the CHE for any reports, whether or not they were meant for public consumption. The committee uploads almost all documents onto their website and “very often that’s how they end up in the public domain,” said Prof Baijnath.
A recent special audit of a university became public in this way.
“There’s no question of us saying ‘no, we cannot give you this report’,” he said. Yet it created tension between the CHE and institutions and the sector at large when confidential documents became public.
The CHE and 11 000 qualifications to be accredited
One of the CHE’s biggest challenges is the accreditation backlog.
They are managing over 11 000 qualifications with the same capacity as when they were managing about 3 000 qualifications. This is a fourfold increase in volume yet the staffing has remained the same and in some instances has actually declined.
Given that the PSET is a 10-year plan, he said it was important that as they added new imperatives for action, the department, the sector and the quality councils did not work at cross-purposes.
So, in a “spirit of cooperation,” the CHE was having discussions with both Universities South Africa and the DHET about spacing out their priorities over five years.
Liberating the regulatory regime
He said they were very conscious of how the regulatory regime could be a stumbling block, especially now, when opportunities are opening up for public institutions in terms of online education and cross-border delivery.
He said the CHE is “paying particular attention to how we liberate the regulatory space and make it possible for the institutions to be more responsive”.
Access was opening up to produce more graduates but, from a quality assurance perspective, they were concerned about the graduates ending up underemployed, unemployed or unemployable. “So we have to give attention to whether we are producing the right kinds of graduates, the right compendium of skills and capabilities for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, for the need of developing society.”
The good news is that the department has provided a “vague big injection of resources” which places the CHE in a better position to fulfil its mandate.
Now that they have the resources to do so, their “immediate priorities are revitalising and re-capacitating the CHE” and, in particular, to introduce special audits.
The CHE is making accreditation simpler
Prof Baijnath said institutions able to demonstrate they have a good, responsive quality assurance system, will not be required to submit each and every programme for accreditation by the CHE. “And that is a status that each institution should aspire towards,” he said..
Delegates’ reactions to Prof Baijnath
Prof Pearl Sithole, Vice-Principal: Academic and Research at the University of the Free State, commented on the pronouncement that if institutions have good management systems, they can rely on their own devices in making sure things go well.
“I think that South Africa deserves a much more transparent, quality determination process; a much more transparent excellence determination process. This goes to not only the potential for curriculum review but to research rating as well,” she said.
Once this transparency is achieved, “then we will all feel comfortable around the extent to which the decolonisation project is also being taken seriously in those processes,” said Sithole.
Caption: South Africa deserves a much more transparent quality determination process, said Prof Pearl Sithole, Vice-Principal: Academic and Research at the University of the Free State.
Prof Heather Nel, Senior Director of Institutional Planning at Nelson Mandela University, spoke about “the potential for over regulation” and higher education institutions’ “burden of reporting”. This referred to everyone from the CHE, the DHET, other national ministries and accountability bodies.
She said it was ironic that “we’re focusing more and more on developing capacity for reporting within universities, as opposed to developing capacity for quality academic core business to take place.” And this concerned the CHE as it was in effect “the hosting body” for PSET, Nel said.
Caption: It is ironic that instead of focusing on the quality of our academic business, we have now fixed our gaze on developing reporting capacity within universities, said Prof Heather Nel, Senior Director of Institutional Planning at Nelson Mandela University.
Prof Adam Habib, Vice-Chancellor for Wits University, took it a step further: Should South Africa have such a centralised accreditation system?
If the CHE has 11 000 courses and programmes, however much more staff they get, they would still be battling. I wonder if we should develop a more decentralised system that says if there’s a process of accreditation, and that process of accreditation has reached a level of sophistication, then you decentralise the accreditation to the institutions themselves.
“If you’re going to do everything, we just don’t have the resources; and the problem is when you don’t have the resources and you have a battle like we have now, we are basically log-jammed in. Frankly South Africa’s university system is constipated unless we start reorganising its operational models.
“Should we have the CHE involved in all these things or should we start to say ‘you do it at a certain level, decentralise the rest of the accreditation and only intervene in the appeal or where there’s a problem’….because you’re constipating the entire system?”
Caption: Should we not be decentralising the accreditation process — up to a certain level — to the institutions themselves? Prof Adam Habib, Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand, asked.
The CHE responds
Prof Baijnath said it was a provocative metaphor “and the point is well taken”. But he pointed out that South Africa has “such an incredible higher education system including your (directed to Habib) institution and certain others are able to compete with the best universities in the world… which tells you something about the system and its robustness- but also about the quality in the system. Of course, the CHE can’t take credit for all of that.”
He questioned what would happen without accreditation.
He said the laissez-faire approach in the post-democracy period had resulted in fly-by-night institutions walking off with students’ fees, as well as institutions offering MBAs of variable quality. “One of the most critical imperatives for regulation is to protect the innocent, and to protect the citizens,” he said.
Regulation was needed to ensure that:
- programmes, whether from public or private institutions, were credible;
- students ended up with a qualification that could gain them employability; and
- qualifications were standardised
Caption: We need regulation to protect the powerless against questionable programme offerings, Prof Baijnath said. That said, the CHE was exploring other options to free up capacity and increase efficiencies.
He said he had been questioned earlier this year as to why a PhD could not be done in one year. Without the CHE or SAQA (South Africa Qualifications Authority), he said there would be no one to say what are the minimum standards, criteria and capacities for such a degree.
It was also important to ensure students were not just being pushed through because that cheapened the qualification.
He said the CHE’s system had national goals, aspiration and objectives but also a pervasive inherited legacy which made it “such an uneven and unequal system”. Plus they were trying to deal with new challenges brought on by the likes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, coupled with a developmental imperative, all happening with limited resources.
“That’s what makes regulation a necessary evil,” he said.
He agreed that trying to manage the 11 000 qualifications was an impossible task – “it’s too onerous, too costly, too time consuming” – so the CHE had done precisely what Habib had suggested and set up internal quality assurance.
He said they were heading for a “non-touch approach”.
This would also liberate the CHE to pay attention to institutions that don’t have that capacity, and help them develop internal quality assurance systems.
Written by Gillian Anstey, an independent writer commissioned by Universities SA.
