COUNCIL ON HIGHER EDUCATION (CHE)
PRESENTATION TO THE PORTFOLIO COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION (NATIONAL ASSEMBLY) ON THE REPORT OF THE COUNCIL ON HIGHER EDUCATION SIZE AND SHAPE TASK TEAM
12 SEPTEMBER 2000
CONTEXT: THE LEGACY
1. HE institutions - HWIS and HBIs - profoundly shaped by apartheid planning and by the respective functions assigned to them in relation to the reproduction of the apartheid social order. Both sets of institutions inextricably linked to the apartheid project, including the bantustan policy.
2. Differentiation along unacceptable lines of race and ethnicity and accompanied by disadvantage of HBIs - related to financial resources and roles allocated to HBIs.
3. Disadvantage not just historical - also related to current capacities to pursue excellence and provide quality experiences and outcomes, and contribute to reconstruction and development.
4. A HE landscape 'largely dictated by the geo-political imagination of apartheid planners.'
CONTEXT: PROBLEMS
1. A number of problems and weaknesses afflict the HE system. These are
· A serious drain on national resources and undermine government's ability to achieve its national goals.
· Also impact negatively on the possibilities for democratic consolidation through not realising social benefits of HE for development of society as a whole.
2. Problems and weaknesses establish key equity, quality, effectiveness and efficiency challenges.
PURPOSES 1. White Paper calls for a single, national, co-ordinated, integrated and yet differentiated HE system which advances equity and quality and serves diverse needs and purposes.
2. The Minister emphasises the need to
-Realise the vision of a rational, seamless HE system, responsive to the
- needs of students of all ages and the intellectual challenges of the 21st century (Minister of Education, Call to Action, 27 July 1999).
3. Minister also stresses that
-the mission and location of HE institutions be re-examined with reference to both the strategic plan for the sector, and the educational needs of local communities and the nation at large in the 21st century.
4. Requests CHE to conduct 'a far-reaching review' (and) provide the Minister 'with a set of concrete proposals on the shape and size of the HE system.'
5. The work of the Task Team animated by the fundamental centrality of HE to the future prospects of South Africa to
· Economic growth, social development and political stability
· Equity and the social advancement of historically disadvantaged social groups
· A better life for all!
6. Overall objective is development of a HE system which delivers effective and efficient provision and is based on equity, quality and excellence, responsiveness, and good governance and management
CORE ISSUES A NEW HE LANDSCAPE
1. The Task Team proposals
· Provide a framework and foundation for making rational the present incoherent, wasteful and uncoordinated higher education system, enabling significant improvements in quality and equity and ensuring that the knowledge and human resource needs of a developing democracy are effectively realised
· Enable the present system to be reconfigured as a differentiated and diverse system so that there can be effective responses from institutions to the varied social needs of the country
· Provide for a new reconfigured system in which institutions have a range of mandates (principal orientations and core foci) and pursue coherent and more explicitly defined educational and social purposes with respect to the production of knowledge and successful graduates
2. Combination includes 'merger' but not reducible to it.
3. Provides for a range of possibilities.
4. offers the opportunity for creating a more rational and responsive higher education landscape than that which is a legacy of apartheid
5. Report provides examples of possible combinations to illustrate the different objectives that could be realised.
6. Report strongly recommends that Minister should investigate full range of possibilities for combinations - also be open to compelling combination possibilities that may emerge from the iterative national planning process.
VALUES: EQUITY
1 Policy = "authoritative allocation of values" - legitimation of values.
2. Achievement of equity is being compromised by inefficiencies, the lack of effectiveness, and shortcomings in quality.
3. Social justice makes imperative the possibility for social advancement (particularly for working class and rural poor learners) through HE and greater levels of equity
4. Equity must mean more than access into HE. Must incorporate equity of opportunity -environments in which learners, through academic support, excellent teaching and mentoring and other initiatives, genuinely have every chance of succeeding.
5. Equity, to be meaningful, is also ensuring that learners have access to quality education, and graduate with the relevant knowledge, competencies, skills and attributes that are required for any occupation and profession.
6. A new HE landscape must ensure equity and equity targets must be established as part of national planning around access to,opportunities within and outcomes of higher education. Must be coupled with tighter regimes of accountability.
7. Under apartheid, institutions for black South Africans and the technikons were disadvantaged. Developmental trajectories needed for institutions to enable them to undertake specified mandates within a new national framework
8. Finance required to achieve equity - but only a necessary condition and not a sufficient condition. A coherent framework for the more effective pursuit of equity is also essential.
9. Coverage and level of student financial aid should be increased and resources made available for academic support and development. Especially necessary to provide access to greater numbers of black learners, to black and women learners in particular areas of study and to learners from working class and rural poor backgrounds.
10. Should be a much greater incorporation of continuing education students than is the case at present. 'Recognition of Prior Learning' initiatives should be promoted to increase the intake of adult learners
SO WHERE TO?
1. The Minister has indicated:
I will publish a national plan, which will contain my Ministry’s comprehensive proposals for the shape and size of the HE system. The plan, which I shall take to Cabinet, will be linked to ongoing processes of institutional planning and to implementation time frameworks.
2 As part of national planning, an iterative process between the Minister and institutions around the reconfiguration of the system, combination and the mandates of institutions
3. Proposals around the 4-year degree (2+2 or otherwise) to the CHE Academic Policy TT and CHE-convened JIP
4. Funding issues to the DoE Reference Group
5. Concerted building of a national quality assurance system
6. Mobilisation of public, international donor and private sector funds for key strategic interventions - especially building a national quality assurance system
7. Human resources required for effective steering and careful planning and implementation - without these reconfiguration and achievement of a new institutional landscape not possible.
8. Report is a contribution to activities of national planning, the development of a national
- plan by the Department of Education, and the production of three-year plans by public higher education institutions.
IN CLOSING 1. Problems and weaknesses of the higher education system will not disappear on their own, or be overcome by institutions on their own, or be overcome through finance alone. Must be confronted and resolved in a systemic way -
Requires reconfiguration of the present system and the creation of new landscape.
Entails extensive, integrated, iterative processes of national planning as well as multiple co-ordinated interventions and initiatives.
Requires political will, sustained commitment and the courage to change at system and institutional level.
2. FOUR options
· Stay as we are - disastrous consequences
· More money as the solution
· The core of what the Report advocates (with smoothing over of whatever rough edges there may be)
· The core of what the Report advocates and more money (First Prize!)
3. Do not want to claim that Report is the last word, or perfect or flawless. It is as perfect as can be a product of just over four months of vigorous and passionate engagement.
4. We have a historic opportunity to reconfigure the HE system in a principled and imaginative way, more suited to the needs of a democracy and all its citizens in contrast to the irrational and exclusionary imperatives that shaped large parts of the current system.
5. Achievement of equity, development, justice and democracy in South Africa requires academics and HE institutions to become powerhouses of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination and diffusion, and of the formation of new generations of thinkers and actors.
6. We displayed remarkable intellectual honesty, ingenuity, creativity, inventiveness, strategic and tactical acumen, stolid courage and purpose to be rid of tyranny and to fashion our democracy.
7 We need to rediscover and reawaken these abilities and aptitudes. And we need to harness them to now think, fashion and innovate the technologies, instruments, mechanisms and processes of transformation towards a HE system that is progressively characterised by equity, quality, responsiveness to economic and social development needs, and effective and efficient provision and management.