The Council on Higher Education (CHE) on Thursday 14 June 2018 released its final revised reaccreditation outcomes concerning the Higher Education Quality Committee’s (HEQC’s) National Review of LLB Programmes. Rhodes’s LLB has been fully reaccredited.
In 2015/16, the CHE undertook a national review of the LLB programme across all 17 public institutions that offer the LLB. During the course of 2017, Rhodes University’s LLB programme was provisionally reaccredited, subject to meeting two specific conditions relating to the improvement of staff diversity and the introduction of a first-year admission point for LLB students. Over and above these structural issues, the educational quality of the Rhodes LLB was found to have met in every respect the requirements of the Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Framework Qualification Standard for a university to offer the Bachelor of Laws degree.
Rhodes’s Law Faculty compiled and submitted Improvement Plans to the CHE during 2017 and 2018 on the conditions identified by the HEQC, supported by extensive documentary evidence. This process has culminated in the announcement by the CHE confirming the Faculty’s full and unconditional accreditation to offer the LLB degree as a qualification.
The Dean of Law, Professor Rosaan Kruger, has expressed her delight at the outcome of what has been a long, but valuable process, and said that the announcement was a firm endorsement of the educational quality of the Faculty’s LLB degree. Despite being small, the Rhodes Law Faculty has always punched above its weight in terms of its graduates’ impact on the legal and related professions in South Africa and around the world, and she said that the Faculty was motivated by the CHE’s affirmation to continue to provide the quality legal education for which it is known to current and future generations of Rhodes students.
14 June 2018