​​The National University Teaching Awards (NUTA) replaced the CHE/HELTASA Teaching Excellence Awards in 2023.

A key promise of the awards is to recognize and reward reflective, critical and contextually aware teaching across the diverse South African higher education sector.

The NUTA aims to, inter alia:

• Achieve equity and representative while aspiring to minimize biased practices, which advantage better-resourced institutions and teachers with privileged cultural and pedagogical capital.
• Create an enabling environment for academics from universities that have been unrepresented or underrepresented.
• ​Develop a mentoring system for award candidates, especially those from unrepresented or underrepresented universities, drawing on suitable mentors which include past awardees.
• ​Accommodate different categories, including individuals and teams, taking into considereation contextual and systemic disparities, while recognizing academics at different stages of their careers, as well as special awards related to specific temporal and contextual conditions.