fet private providers site visit and verification report - Umalusi

meaningful engagement with the players in the sector. Its tasks at the moment are to formulate keyquestions to help shape its involvement in quality assurance of the sector, and to give guidance toits registered providers.These questions include:• The need to defi ne the scope of Umalusi’s responsibilities in relation to programme andqualifi cation type. Unit-standard based occupational qualifi cations that will clearly fallunder the proposed QCTO and related skills programmes will not be Umalusi’s primaryconcern, although there may be implications for partnerships in relation to cross-sectoralelements of these qualifi cations. Provider-based qualifi cations and short courses may needto be categorised in some way that will determine whether any of these are relevant toUmalusi’s mandate.• The need to select a model that is useful and implementable for this sector. A qualityassurance model can choose to focus on different features of a system rather thanaddressing all organisational and delivery elements. Prioritisation questions are key: shouldthe focus be, for example, on minimum institutional requirements, or should the emphasisbe on the quality of learner achievements (for example, through common externalassessments, through monitoring and evaluation, through sampling) as the need arises?• The need to fi nd ways to manage issues around articulation and equivalence, such asaccess and progress between different routes, or common understandings of the crosssectoralcomponents of qualifi cations. This involves setting up working relationships withother quality assurance bodies with an interest in FET, or who build on FET.• The need to provide clear guidelines to those providers who must register with Umalusi, inorder to alleviate some of the pressures they face.In the interests of building up a preliminary view of the providers who will be approaching Umalusifor accreditation, then, we will now turn to an overview of the key trends shown by the data collectionand verifi cation process.7