Abstract:

South Africa’s teacher education programmes continue to attract much criticism in light of the declining standards of high school graduates and the country’s relative poor performance in international literacy and numeracy tests such as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). The improvement of the quality of teacher education is an important aspect of government’s efforts aimed at improving the overall quality of education. It is generally thought that deficient teacher education programmes produce un/under prepared teachers who in turns produce substandard learners at school level.

So, from 2004 to 2009, all the public higher education institutions in South Africa, and the qualifying private providers of higher education, underwent quality audits of the effectiveness of their arrangements for the management of quality in the three core functions of teaching and learning, research and community engagement. Unfortunately, due to the broad mandate of the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC), the voice and perceptions of students in the debate on quality were not sufficiently fore grounded.

This paper presents the findings of an independent survey involving 578 final year bachelor of education students in four South African universities. The discussion focuses on the students’ perception of the quality of teacher education and their degree of satisfaction with it. The paper attempts to relate these two parameters with the students‘ perceptions of their lecturers (teacher educators). The lecturer is the interface between the student and the institution, therefore his performance reflects on the institution.

Keywords:

Quality, teacher education, students’ perceptions, teacher educator, South Africa.