Abstract:

Quality assurance in South Africa is entrenched in the Higher Education Act, Act 101 of 1997 as amended. The Act makes provision for the establishment of the Council on Higher Education, a quality council (QC) for Higher Education in the Country. The QC expect Higher education institutions in South Africa to take responsibility for internal quality assurance which includes development, management, monitoring and evaluation policies, systems and process in respect to provisioning of services.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the preparatory journey for the quality audits or reviews by the Common Wealth of Learning and the Council on Higher Education 2nd cycle of Institutional Audits that were conducted between 2019 and 2021. This paper argues that COVID-19 and its prescripts brought new challenge in respect to how sector handled quality assurance, promotion and enhancement in a context dominated by regulations and protocols to adhere to COVID-19 protocols in the country. Literature on audits in South Africa and globally informed the discussion and this was complemented with Bain, Ballantyne, Mills and Lester reflective framework. The framework follows defined steps as part of the reflective practice, which are reporting, responding, reasoning, relation and reconstructing phases. Our findings are that while there is propensity to preserve the old normal in our ways of thinking and doing, the pandemic has created new lenses for quality practitioners to also consider and provided affordable means of managing, assuring, enhancing quality in Higher education institutions across the world.

The paper concludes by acknowledging that audits/reviews do provide rich data on areas that need focused attention and provide great insights on the performance of the University against its mission and vision especially on veracity of system, processes and policies enacted to manage quality education.

Keywords:

Institutional Audits, reflective practice, Transformation and quality Assurance and Enhancement.