Government is cutting 1,475 qualifications
Retha van Rooyen
Issue 01 Β· Saturday 9 August 2026
2,800 words, about 11 minutes
IN THIS ISSUE
- Why 1,475 qualifications just hit their expiry date
- The number that limits the whole change: 21,000
- Parliament looks at your pricing on 28 August
- Why I would start your accreditation renewal in September
What you are getting. This brief goes out once a month. Section one is public and free to forward. Everything below it is for subscribers, free for MSH landlords and R297 a month for everyone else. Written by me, not by a team.
The bottom line. Government is deliberately moving college students out of classrooms and into workshops. The courses being cut are the cheap, high-volume ones taught on city campuses. The courses replacing them need workshops and employers, which not every town has. Nobody has published what that does to enrolment, and enrolment is what fills beds.
1. WHAT MOVED
1,475 qualifications have hit their expiry date
Every qualification in South Africa is registered, and those registrations have end dates. On 11 June 2026 the Minister of Higher Education, Buti Manamela, gave the numbers for a clean-out that has been running quietly since 2024.
By the numbers: 1,475 qualifications designed before 2009 had reached their end date. 630 were given extra time, between six months and two years, decided case by case. The rest were cancelled. 948 new-style qualifications are now registered to replace them.
βThese are not blanket extensions.β
The rules sort everything into four groups. New-style qualifications are untouched. Older ones and NATED get six months to two years, depending on whether a replacement exists and whether the industry is ready. Qualifications tied to regulated professions get up to three years. Trades get nothing extra where a replacement already exists.
A full list of every affected qualification, how long it has left and what replaces it was due to be published by SAQA, the body that keeps the national register. The government notice giving effect to it was expected on 15 June 2026.
Why it matters: That list is the document that says which courses a campus is still allowed to take new students into. Until it is public, nobody can honestly tell you which courses at the campus near your building survive. I am chasing it.
Six college courses are reported to close to new students from 2027
News24 reported in April, on an answer the Minister gave in Parliament, that six NCV courses stop taking new students from 2027 across all fifty TVET colleges. Students already enrolled finish.
The six are finance, economics and accounting; management; marketing; office administration; education and development; and process plant operations.
The reasons given were that these courses do not lead clearly to a job or on to further study, that too few students complete them, and that they do not match what employers are hiring for.
Handle with care. I could not find the actual parliamentary answer, so this rests on one news report. It has also never been publicly connected to the clean-out above, so these may be one exercise or two separate decisions. The department did not answer News24's questions.
Why it matters: Five of those six are classroom courses that run in large numbers on city campuses. If the report is right, the intake to worry about is the first years arriving in 2027, not the students you have now.
N4 to N6 is being wound down on its own timetable
The department issued a circular in July 2025, and a revised version since, setting out how the old N4 to N6 courses get phased out. The Minister told students already enrolled to carry on and not to worry about their qualifications losing recognition.
Handle with care. I am not printing the year-by-year dates. The versions circulating do not agree with each other, they do not agree with what individual colleges have published on their own websites, and the revised circular is the one that counts. I would rather give you nothing than a date you plan around and then find has moved.
Why it matters: The entry year is what fills beds. Students already in the system carry occupancy for another year or two, and then that stops. This builds rather than arriving all at once.
Every accreditation in the country is being audited this year
In March, NSFAS said it βhas initiated a national audit of student accommodation accreditation, which will be conducted throughout 2026β. Parliament was told it is expected to take at least twelve months, and that where accreditation had been incorrectly granted, or standards had not been maintained, consequence management would follow. Unannounced on-site inspections started in January. The SIU investigation running alongside it includes an audit of all accredited beds.
Why it matters: this collides with something else in the calendar that almost nobody is talking about, and it decides whether your property can take NSFAS students next year. My recommendation on it is below.
Before you read on. If you want to see how your own property grades against the eleven NSFAS categories, the scorecard takes about eight minutes and costs nothing. Grade a property
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