Further education and training colleges in South Africa at a glance in 2010: KwaZulu-Natal: Mthashana FET college

Abstract

In May-June 2010 the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) undertook, on behalf of the National Board for Further Education and Training (NBFET), an audit of the Further Education and Training (FET) college sector in South Africa. The corporate campuses of all fifty colleges were visited over a two-day period. In the course of the audit, the HSRC collected information on college governance and management, staff and student profiles, and student efficiency rates. While the research team's brief was to focus on college governance and management in an attempt to address the question of whether colleges were ready to be absorbed into the newly-formed Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and to operate on a defined autonomy basis, the comprehensiveness of the audit (entailing visits to all 50 colleges) provided the research team with an opportunity to collect information on the other aforementioned aspects: staff and student profiles; and student efficiency rates. The decision to collect these other pieces of information was motivated also by the rationale that colleges' ability to participate in the survey would itself provide a good indication of their capacity for self-governance. Indeed, the findings of the audit bear out the differential capacity of the different parts of the sector in responding to an exercise of this kind.

This report is indicator-driven, the key points of measurement within the five areas under investigation (governance; management; staff profiles; student profiles; and efficiency rates) having been condensed into high-level findings that can readily be absorbed by policy-makers and departmental officials alike.

There are two sections to this report. The first presents, in five sub-sections, a set of tables containing key high-level findings of the project. The five sub-sections are: Governance; Management; Staff Profiles; Student Profiles; and Efficiency Rates. The second section comprises a narrative report based upon the tables in Section 1.

The organising principle behind the report is comparative. There is a report on each of the fifty colleges, each report comparing the college's status or performance on any given indicator to the national profile and to the profile of the province in which the college is located. This enables the reader to assess "at a glance" the extent to which the college conforms to or deviates from national and provincial profiles.