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Auxilia Katongomara, Chronicle Reporter
THE National Qualifications Framework (NQF) aimed at reforming the country’s higher education system to ensure that qualifications’ attained at polytechnics and teachers’ colleges are taken into consideration when one enrols at university will be out in April.
The move follows concerns by those holding qualifications from teachers’ colleges and polytechnics whose qualifications are ignored by universities.
Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development, Professor Amon Murwira said through the national qualification framework, the education sector would be able to take into cognisance prior educational qualifications.
“We are having a programme called national qualifications framework where we are saying our qualifications must have progression. It’s like from A Level, a person goes to university, but our Higher and Tertiary Education is very confused.
If I go to Bulawayo Poly and finish my higher national diploma and then I go to NUST, the system treats you as if you are coming from A level, but surely you are post A Level. They teach you introduction to computers but you are already an expert now,” said Prof Murwira.
“So we are saying the system has to recognise what we call prior learning. You are teaching me this but I already know it. Our systems have to learn to lock into each other so that it recognises that at Poly, they are not sleeping, they are working too. At teachers’ colleges, they are not sleeping they are working too. So the NQF is going to produce this requirement”.
Prof Murwira said the Zimbabwe Council for Higher Education (Zimche) was already working on it and it would be released by April 10.
“Zimche is leading the pack and we want to make sure that the national qualification framework is there by 10 April. This time we are not joking; all jokers step aside. We are doing it , and we have the energy,” he said.
Prof Murwira said the Ministry was also conducting a National Skills Audit to review the curriculum.
“We have what we call the national skills audit where we say which are the skills that are useful today and which are skills that are no longer useful and skills that are useful tomorrow. This document will be a basis for some of our curriculum review programmes,” he said.
“We want to get rid of the yellow pages professor, where you hear someone saying this is what I have been teaching since 1976. So you mean from 1976 nothing changed? I don’t want to smuggle your notes of 1984 and still pass your exam of 2018. When I smuggle those notes I must find it hard to pass your exam of 2018”.
Prof Murwira challenged universities to be ready when offering degree programmes and warned that fraudulently awarding marks was a recipe for disaster.
“For any programme that we offer, let’s be prepared. For example, you train a medical doctor and you know that they are not well trained or you fake their marks and then they are given a certificate to practise. One day as a professor you pass out and then you are revived and you see it’s that student whom you awarded marks. You die right there,” said the Minister.
@AuxiliaK
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