91 Social Work/Maatskaplike Werk 2009:45(1) OUTCOMES-BASED ASSESSMENT: NECESSARY EVIL OR TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL? Vivienne Bozalek INTRODUCTION Social work educational providers at higher educational institutions (HEIs) in South Africa have been obliged since 2008 to engage with the South African Qualifications Authority’s (SAQA’s) qualification of the Bachelor of Social Work (BSW), which was registered in June 2003 in the National Qualifications Framework (NQF). In February 2004 the South African Social Service Professions Council (SACSSP) wrote a letter to all social work educational providers requesting them to benchmark their current curriculum against the new minimum standard requirements of the BSW on a template. Furthermore, providers of social work education and training had to indicate how they would change their current learning programmes to accommodate the minimum standards, which encompass 27 exit-level outcomes and their associated assessment criteria. Providers had until June 2006 to comply with the requirements of the new BSW qualification and had to start implementation of the learning programme in January 2007. These national changes in policy have made it important for social work educators in South African HEIs to carefully consider how they will provide learning opportunities for their undergraduate students to attain the BSW outcomes. Furthermore, the alignment of the curriculum across year levels as a collaborative exercise in social work programmes from a programmatic perspective becomes essential to plan for learning opportunities where students will be ultimately able to demonstrate that they are competent in 27 outcomes. In order to engage in such activities, social work educators need to engage with the concepts of outcomes- based education (OBE), which has now become an important component of educational policy in South Africa (Naicker, 2000). These changes require a different way of viewing and practising teaching and learning. Instead of concentrating on inputs or engaging primarily with the content of teaching, educators need to look at the sorts of capabilities which the BSW qualification identifies as important for beginner-level social workers. These capabilities are implicit in the exit-level outcomes and their associated assessment criteria. Social work educators will have to involve themselves in the process of establishing outcomes-based assessment plans and more learner-centred education in order to meet the minimum requirements of both the professional quality assurance body (the SACSSP) as well as the Higher Education Quality Assurance Council (HEQC). There has been some literature on how to engage with outcomes-based assessment plans and procedures and with innovative learner- centred education in Social Work and more generally in higher education (Adler & Reed, 2002; Biggs & Tang, 2007; Bous & Falchikov, 2007; Butcher, Davies & Highton, 2006; Carter, 2005; Driscoll & Wood, 2007; Gibbs, 2006). This paper is a description of my own initial attempts to engage with what I term a “SAQAfication” of the curriculum by focusing on two processes involving outcomes-based education. The first process was my own engagement with how best to incorporate the learning outcomes of the BSW qualification into a new module that related to the theory and practice of social work intervention. It was important for me that the incorporation of the learning outcomes should enhance rather than detract from the process of teaching and learning, and should both inform and improve the relevance of the content of what was taught – particularly http://socialwork.journals.ac.za/ http://dx.doi.org/10.15270/45-1-225