The changing faces of the South African national qualifications framework

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Acknowledgements

This paper was written during an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship, award number PTA-026-27-2166. I am grateful to Jeanne Gamble and Michael Young for comments on earlier versions.

Notes

1. South African Qualifications Authority Act No. 58 of 1995.

2. Qualification types refers to, for example, ‘Advanced Diploma’ or ‘Bachelor’s Degree’, which could be modified by a designator, or Advanced Diploma (Drama), or Bachelor’s Degree (Linguistics). But the actual awarded qualifications would be linked to the awarding institution, and based on their prescriptions for subject choices, and their curriculum and assessment policies.

3. In 2007, 172 unit standards-based qualifications and 2211 unit standards had awards made against them to a total of 37,841 and 562,174 learners respectively (many of these will be to the same learners – the figures reflect the total number of awards, not the number of awards per learner). Data was supplied by the SAQA NLRD.