Welcome

Welcome to HESA’s Enrolment Services website

On this site, we aim to provide information about four distinct but interrelated services being developed by Higher Education South Africa (HESA) – 1) The National Information Service for Higher Education (NiSHE); 2) The current Matriculation Board and future Minimum Admissions Service 3) The National Benchmark Tests Project and future Assessment Service and 4) the Monitoring Systems Flow project.  

HESA is the new leadership association of the university sector representing the heads of all public universities, universities of technology and comprehensive universities.

The idea of a responsive higher education (HE) enrolment system offering a range of services to students, institutions and the sector reaches back to the access imperatives of the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the concern with equity and quality of opportunity.

Subsequently these imperatives have found expression in a range of policy and planning frameworks, most notably the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE, 1996); The White Paper 3, A Programme for the Transformation of Higher Education (July 1997); and the more recent National Plan for Higher Education (2001).

Two particular policies in the past year have created further impetus for the kinds of services that make up HESA’s enrolment programme:  

• The policy on Minimum Admission Requirements for Higher Certificate, Diploma and Degree Programmes requiring the National Senior Certificate (August 2005); and

• The amended policy on the new schools curriculum for Grades 10-12 and the National Senior Certificate: A Qualification at Level 4 on the NQF (July 2005).

At a macro level, the enrolment management planning framework developed by the Department of Education in 2005 further constrains the nature of services that must be provided in order to develop a coherent and responsive enrolment system for the HE sector.

The overall goal of HESA ’s enrolment services is to develop, at a national systems level, responsiveness to the different challenges entailed in access and the consequences of a changing FET-HE interface. A particularly important achievement has been the strong partnership forged with the Department of Education (HE and FET branches) and it is anticipated that this partnership will continue in order to strengthen system linkages between schooling, FET colleges and higher education.