Current Regulatory Information

The South African education environment has been fraught with change during the past few years. The most important trends in all levels of education, school and post school, is the quest for quality and the assurance thereof. To this effect, appropriate Acts of Parliament have resulted in a number of quality assurance bodies being established in order to regulate the environment. Both the Higher Education Act and the Further Education and Training Act make provision for the legal establishment and operation of private institutes of learning.

As an outcome of this process, the Educor institutions offering Higher Education programmes have all been scrutinised and were all found to meet more than the minimum criteria for accreditation, resulting in full accreditation by the appropriate body and registration with the Department of Education. The Milpark Business School MBA programme also received full accreditation as a result of the national review. The Milpark MBA is one of only eighteen that survived the rigorous scrutiny of the HEQC.

Higher education took the lead and the private institutions in the field were put through a rigorous exercise of quality assurance, resulting in accreditation of institutions and programmes. Accreditation of Private Higher Education Institutions by the HEQC during the last number of years has helped tremendously in allaying the fears of parents and other sponsors of students in the private higher education sector. Extending the same accreditation system to the public sector from 2005 contributed greatly towards stabilising this sector and establishing a universal and quality higher education sector in South Africa.

One of the first of such exercises was the national review of MBA programmes during which both public and private providers were put through a rigorous accreditation exercise. This was a world first and gave an indication of the seriousness with which the South African education sector regards quality assurance.

The registration process of providers in the Further Education and Training field is currently under way, both with the appropriate accreditation bodies and with the DoE.