The Botswana Qualifications Authority (BQA) has revealed that 45 Education Training Providers (ETP’s) have applied for registration under the Higher Education category in January 2017 with 24 registered and accredited, 17 still being processed and 3 being discontinued.
The discontinued ETP’s are Deborah Retief School of Nursing, Francistown College of Education and Maun Technical College. Private ETP’s will continue running learning programmes under different statuses such as fully accredited, provisionally accredited, deferred accreditation and approved.
“Regarding the public ETP’s, they will continue running the learning programmes that were registered under the old system. It should be noted that public ETP’s were not required to have their programmes accredited with the authority,” said Selebo Auma Jobe, Acting Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for Botswana Qualifications Authority (BQA).
She said, “In terms of the transition time frames, ETP’s will be allowed to enroll learners into the learning programmes under the legacy system until 2nd December 2020. The learners will be allowed to graduate from the programmes they enrolled in unless where they are able to transfer to a similar programme under the NCQF system. It should be noted that qualifications under the old system are legal and graduates will be recognized.”
According to BQA officials there has been an influx of application since August 2018 when the Authority issued public notices on deadlines for submission. As at 8th February 2019, 269 TVET applications were received with 14 conventional TVET’s both registered and accredited with another 5 workplace TVET’s and 89 consultancies also completing this exercise.
4 locally awarding bodies the Botswana Institute of Chartered of Accountants, Department of Teacher Training and Technical Education, BOTHO University and Botswana Examination Council (BEC) have also been registered and accredited. A total of 21 qualifications have been registered on the National Qualifications Framework (NCQF), 1 has been rejected and 6 were withdrawn.
“Turnaround times were seriously underestimated and needed to be reviewed. The process took way longer than initially anticipated,” said Dr Justice Gaeonale, Director of National Credit and Qualifications Framework at Botswana Qualifications Authority (BQA).
He said “The volume of qualifications received were just too heavy for the available compliment. It has proven not very easy to have the needed experts to attend the workshops meant for training them for validation of qualifications. There are a lot of qualifications that have not yet been validated due to lack of trained experts e.g. Informatics, real estate, policing, forensic investigations, risk management, insurance, health management, early childhood education.”
According to BQA authorities in an effort to build a seamless education system feedback has been sought from learners who commonly complain of the unavailability of equipment leading to failure to provide practical work for leaners, non-availability of support staff like lab technicians to help students conduct experiments, misplacement of scripts and or marks and a failure to implement assessment policies and procedures. ETP’s often pass inspections and then retrench and run on skeleton staff.
“Some ETP’s do not have sufficient complaints handling processes with no record of complaints lodged and how they were handled. Response to complaints casually handled, communication verbal and therefore no paper trail,” said Bakani Thothe, Manager Customer Services of BQA.
He said, “They were also concerns about inadequate guidance by enrolments office leading to learner enrolling for wrong modules. This leads to additional funds being demanded after the event.”BQa was established on November 8, 2013 by the Botswana Qualifications ACT No. 24 of 2013, thus repealing the Vocational Training Act, 1998, which had established the Botswana Training Authority.
The Authority co-ordinates education from early childhood to PHD.
