Full accreditation for UCT’s LLB programme

The Council on Higher Education (CHE) last week confirmed full accreditation for the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Bachelor of Laws (LLB) programme. This follows a review by the CHE late last year as part of the accreditation process for law degrees in South Africa to develop a qualification standard for LLB programmes.

The CHE is responsible for quality assurance in higher education, and the national review is a peer-driven exercise. It focuses on the re-accreditation of existing programmes, based on the CHE’s accreditation criteria and the LLB qualification standard.

As part of the review, the CHE gave UCT’s Faculty of Law until the end of May 2018 to submit an improvement plan for certain aspects of the programme.

“We are completely committed to ensuring that the faculty continues to deserve the high esteem in which its qualifications, especially the LLB degree, are held nationally and internationally.”

“We will be keeping a close eye on our improvement plan and on our progress, to maintain and drive forward our excellence in legal education,” said acting Dean of the Faculty of Law, Professor Hugh Corder.

“We are completely committed to ensuring that the faculty continues to deserve the high esteem in which its qualifications, especially the LLB degree, are held nationally and internationally.”

The faculty put significant thought, planning and energy into the submission and the improvement plan. Working with the CHE and with the support of UCT’s Institutional Planning Department (under the leadership of Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Teaching and Learning Associate Professor Lis Lange), the faculty provided an extensive account of its plans and mechanisms for monitoring future progress.

The plan focused on the following aspects, as stipulated by the CHE:

• Faculty plans for reviewing the curriculum in relation to the purpose of the LLB degree and graduate attributes
• The improvement of course coordination and the rate at which students progress through the degree
• The extent to which the faculty incorporates the notion of transformative constitutionalism in course content

The faculty was pleased with the input and insights provided by its staff, students and graduates as part of the review process, according to Corder.

The law programme is among the 11 UCT subjects recently ranked in the top 100 in the QS World University Rankings by Subject. UCT remains the top law school in Africa, with graduates in high demand by law firms across the country.