Analysis of the Influence of Regulatory Enforcement Shifts from Coercive to Collaborative on Compliance Behaviors within the Pre-Tertiary Education Regulatory Environment

Abstract

The use of the coercive (traditional enforcement) approach in enforcing regulatory compliance to aspects of the Education Regulatory Act, 2020 (Act 1023), that is overseen by the National Schools Inspectorate Authority (NaSIA), led to media clamor and a high level of non-compliance, which necessitated the development of a new collaborative approach to change non-compliance behavior in the education regulatory environment. With critics raising alarm over the tendency of the new approach to deepen the level of non-compliance instead of solving the problem, there was a need to explore this new approach to understand the effectiveness and efficiency of the new collaborative approach. The research design used to address the research problem was divided into two (2) phases. The main approach focused on using situational analysis of a case to describe the regulatory environment of NaSIA before and after the change in the regulatory enforcement approach of the regulator and the compliance behavior of the regulated entities. The second phase entailed the use of descriptive statistics to analyze survey data of regulated entities (pre-tertiary education institutions) to verify the veracity of the attitudes or thoughts identified in the situational analysis. The study showed that the adoption of the new approach reduced the level of agitation and clamor in the media, and the level of regulatory compliance increased, leading to over six thousand (6000) pre-tertiary education institutions that were considered non-compliant in 2021 attaining full compliance at the end of 2022. This is a 75% improvement in regulatory compliance over the previous year, demonstrating the success of the new strategy in attaining the regulator’s primary goal.