By Shuli Sudderuddin

It is not the responsibility of consumer watchdog Case to ensure academic excellence.

That is what Mr Seah Seng Choon, executive director of the Consumers Association of Singapore (Case), said in the wake of comments made after the closure of Brookes Business School.

The school had CaseTrust accreditation before it was expelled from the scheme on July 15.

This came after The Straits Times broke the story about how it had been peddling fake degrees from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

CaseTrust, which comes under Case, was launched in 1999. It is an accreditation scheme in which companies pay application and assessment fees to get accredited.

Companies must meet certain criteria and fulfil certain conditions.

The scheme covers industries like retail, maid agencies and spas. The education arm was launched in 2004. Under it, schools are supposed to deposit fees paid to them with an approved bank or to protect the fees with insurance.

Brookes was closed by the Ministry of Education (MOE) two weeks ago, leaving some 400 students in the lurch. Its owner, Mr Benny Yap, is being investigated by the police.

Amid these developments, readers had written to The Straits Times forum questioning the effectiveness of the accreditation.

Mr Seah said that while CaseTrust is stepping up checks on private education organisations - there are about 300 under CaseTrust - Case's purview actually does not extend to academic excellence.

The CaseTrust scheme for education comes under the Education Excellence Framework which was developed in 2004 by the Economic Development Board (EDB) to protect student interests and to build high-quality education providers.

There are three components: organisational excellence; academic excellence and excellence in student protection; and welfare practices.

CaseTrust is responsible for excellence in student protection and welfare practices, including protecting fees.

The organisational excellence component is covered under the Singapore Quality Class scheme run by Spring Singapore.

Mr Seah said the academic excellence component, which includes ensuring that the institution delivers quality programmes, 'was supposed to be looked after by a council. However, that council did not materialise, to my knowledge'.

An accreditation council was supposed to have been set up by the Ministry of Trade and Industry, according to an EDB press statement given out at the inception of the Education Excellence Framework in 2004.

Said Mr Seah: 'It would have been good if it had been put in place so that the degree programmes could be more closely examined. CaseTrust is not meant to take care of that issue. Only qualified educationists can do that.'

Mr Seah added that CaseTrust's job is to protect students' fees, which it had done successfully, until the Brookes incident.

It has been reported that students paid up to $30,000 in school fees and some may get back only $1,000 as the fees were under-insured. Mr Seah said CaseTrust found that insurance had been taken up by Brookes. However, 'it was insufficient and the students' insurance certificates were withheld by the school'.

Mr Seah said that while CaseTrust had put in place criteria to ensure that students were sufficiently insured and had received their certificates, it was not possible to check if this was done for every student.

Still, he added that CaseTrust is stepping up checks on private schools so that everything will be in order when the new EduTrust quality assurance scheme kicks in.

EduTrust is part of a new regulatory regime under the pro-tem Council for Private Education, set up by the MOE to develop a quality private education sector. It will take over the current Education Excellence Framework.

CaseTrust will not be part of EduTrust.

The EDB told The Sunday Times it 'sincerely regrets' the problems and inconvenience that students are facing due to the closure of Brookes.

Mr Seah noted that other CaseTrust accreditation schemes have not met with major lapses so far.

CaseTrust engages industry consultants to set its criteria. Accreditation is renewable every four years and there are interim assessments every two years combined with mystery shopping exercises.

Schemes are reviewed every four to five years.

Said Mr Seah of the state of accreditation for education: 'I hope that EduTrust will fill the current gaps or we will still be limping with one missing leg.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times.