Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Previous Archive
04 February 2021 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Sonia Small (Kaleidoscope Studio)
Prof Hendri Kroukamp has been appointed to the Accreditation Committee of the International Commission on Accreditation of Public Administration Education and Training.

Prof Hendri Kroukamp, Dean of the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences at the University of the Free State (UFS), has been appointed to the Accreditation Committee (AC) of the International Commission on the Accreditation of Public Administration Education and Training (ICAPA) in January 2021.

He is serving on this committee with, inter alia, John-Mary Kauzya, Chief of the Public Service Innovation Branch of the United Nations (UN); Lichia Saner-Yiu, President of the Academy for Quality in Training and Education, Geneva, Switzerland; and Allan Rosenbaum, Public Service Adviser to President Joe Biden of the USA and President of the American Society for Public Administration (ASPA). 

Ensuring accountability and transparency 

Prof Kroukamp supports the belief that an effective government and public administration are essential in the promotion of economic development and in ensuring the kind of accountability and transparency that are central to sustaining a democratic society. 

He is convinced that high-quality education and training is key in producing effective and accountable public administrators and government officials.

Consequently, he says that providing the highest quality of public administration education and training must be a central objective of all those concerned with promoting and sustaining democratic and prosperous societies. “It is of critical importance to preparing the next generation of public administrators and government officials. The current generation of public administrators and government officials also need constant development in terms of their competencies, skills, and capabilities,” he adds.

Standard of excellence prescribes programmes 

ICAPA, which provides quality assurance services for education and training programmes in public administration, will address these objectives. 

Based on self-evaluation reports and site visits, programmes are confronted with the Standards of Excellence for Public Administration Education and Training. These are jointly developed by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) and the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA). 

Serving on the Accreditation Committee, part of his role will include adopting the accreditation criteria, constituting site-visit teams, deciding on accreditation, submitting the annual plan and report, and serving in this main pool of site reviewers. 

News Archive

Study on school violence shows the secondary school environment compels learners to be armed
2015-01-26

The secondary school environment apparently compels learners to come to school armed. This is according to a study done by Dr Lynette Jacobs, a lecturer at the School of Education Studies at the University of the Free State.

In her study, Dr Jacobs found that learners from more affluent schools carry noticeably more weapons than learners in less affluent schools. Learners in the lower grades of secondary schools also use and carry more weapons than learners in the higher grades.

Dr Jacobs says while many reasons for school violence can be noted, such as to forcibly take the victims money and food, racial differences, religious differences, as well as the immigrant status of one of the parties involved, these were reasons indicated by less than 10% of the participants in the study.

“There is no single explanation for the threat of violence at schools and most acts of school violence appear to happen randomly, often out of instant retaliation.”

For the study, Dr Jacobs did surveys at schools across three provinces in South Africa.

“Although it varies in levels of seriousness, incidences of physical violence and verbal cruelty consistently occur at South Africans schools. I found that learners are furthermore regularly mocked, insulted, cursed and humiliated by peers.”

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept