Research in Progress: Assessment Governance in CAPS-Aligned Education

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January marks a period of focused inquiry at the Laubscher Institute for Research. This month’s work centres on assessment governance, curriculum standardisation, and market dynamics as interconnected features of South Africa’s schooling system, rather than as isolated policy concerns.

A key area of attention is the growing circulation of commercially produced, CAPS-aligned assessment and memorandum resources. These materials are increasingly positioned as practical solutions to workload, compliance, and accountability pressures faced by educators. Yet the governance frameworks within which such resources operate — and the implications of their widespread availability for assessment integrity, equity, and public trust — remain insufficiently examined. TLIR’s work treats assessment not merely as a classroom practice, but as a public function shaped by regulation, incentives, and institutional oversight.

As part of this inquiry, TLIR is examining assessment policy and quality assurance as systems of governance rather than as questions of individual professional conduct. Particular attention is being given to how standardised curricula interact with performative accountability environments, and how these conditions may give rise to unregulated assessment markets operating alongside formal quality assurance structures.

This research also considers regulation as a process rather than a static framework. Quality assurance systems are designed to protect credibility and comparability, yet they necessarily define boundaries around what is regulated and what falls outside formal oversight. Understanding how these boundaries are drawn — and where regulatory silence may emerge — is central to assessing contemporary risks to assessment systems.

Underlying this work is a broader interest in institutional authority and responsibility. The project explores how assessment credibility is maintained, how risk is distributed across systems, and how public trust is sustained in contexts where private actors increasingly mediate access to curriculum-aligned resources. Power, in this sense, is examined not as intent or misconduct, but as structure: embedded in policy design, regulatory scope, and accountability mechanisms.

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- The Laubscher Institute for Research 2026