Issued by the Minister of Education
18 July 2000
Soon after taking office as Minister of Education, I announced my intention to institute a review of the institutional landscape of higher education. I subsequently asked the Council on Higher Education (CHE) to provide me with advice on how to reconfigure the higher education system so that it would meet the high-level human resource needs of the country. The CHE is the statutory body charged with the responsibility of providing independent policy advice on higher education to the Minister of Education.
In December 1999, I received a Memorandum from the CHE in which the Council recommended the key principles and bases within which the reconfiguration of the higher education system should take place. The CHE also proposed the establishment of a Task Team to develop the details of a framework and strategy for the reconfiguration of the higher education landscape. This Task Team, popularly referred to as the "Size and Shape" Task Team, was made up of leaders from higher education, business and labour.
Today the Task Team’s Report entitled "Towards a New Higher Education Landscape: Meeting the Equity, Quality and Social Development Imperatives of South Africa in the Twenty-First Century", is received on my behalf from the Chairperson of the CHE, Professor Wiseman Nkuhlu. The report is also publicly released today by the CHE.
I wish to thank Professor Nkuhlu and the members of the Task Team for meeting my very tight deadlines for the submission of the Report. The Task Team completed its work in less than six months.
I am sure that the Report will generate much interest and will stimulate intense debate, particularly among higher education constituencies. I shall closely follow this debate.
My Department and I will study the Report in the coming days. It is envisaged that the Government’s response to the Report will take the form of a national plan for higher education. This plan will establish indicative targets for the size and shape of the system, overall growth and participation rates, and institutional and programmatic configurations. The plan will also address time-frames for implementation. The national plan will be informed by the CHE Task Team Report as well as ongoing work of the Department of Education, including the analysis of institutional plans of various higher education institutions.
As I indicated at the very beginning of this process, I intend to take a draft of the national plan to Cabinet in September after consultation with my colleagues in Government. The plan, once approved by Cabinet, will serve as the basis for discussions with individual higher education institutions about their future roles and locations in the new institutional landscape.
From the outset, I have emphasised that this exercise will be complex, but we nevertheless need to consider the President’s question to us last year, namely whether we have "an education system fit for the 21st century", especially in the context of the information technology, social and the scientific needs of our country.
Enquiries: Thembile Kulati, Ministerial Adviser, 083 454 2176 or 012 312 5440