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'Radical change' is needed to reassure public on standards
1 October 2009
Hefce report places communication at heart of proposals to build trust. Rebecca Attwood writes
External examiners would be interviewed by inspection teams and universities would give a clear indication of the number of hours they expect students to study under plans to boost public confidence in the quality of higher education.
A new "public-facing" role for the Quality Assurance Agency and an independent channel for external examiners to report concerns are also among the wide-ranging proposals published in a report to the Higher Education Funding Council for England on 1 October.
Hefce's Teaching, Quality and the Student Experience sub-committee, chaired by Colin Riordan, vice-chancellor of the University of Essex, was set up to investigate concerns about standards raised last year.
Its key message is that while there is "no systemic failure" in the sector, allegations of poor quality pose a serious risk to its reputation, and "radical change" is required in the way that information about quality and standards is communicated.
In future, universities that fail to provide adequate information to the public about courses could receive a "limited confidence" or "no confidence" judgment from the QAA.
External examiners
Professor Riordan says that the external-examiner system, now being reviewed by Universities UK, is "nothing like as dysfunctional as some would have us believe", but would benefit from more powers.
The report calls for more scrutiny of externals' views during institutional audits, for the sector to agree a common job description, and for a mechanism that lets externals raise concerns independently if they are unhappy with university responses.
John Selby, director of education and participation at Hefce, said: "In a minority of cases ... where external examiners have had some issues they think the institution has not addressed well enough, they have felt they have nowhere else to go."
If audit panels also interviewed external examiners, this would "send a very public signal that they are taken very seriously", Dr Selby added.
Contact time and learning hours
The report admits that staff-student contact hours in the UK are shorter than they are elsewhere, but says it does not follow that standards are lower.
It argues that universities should publish information on the nature and amount of staff contact that students can expect, the learning effort expected, the time this will take, and the academic support likely to be available.
It adds that universities should make clear the rationale for individual courses' contact hours and how they relate to other resources.
"If the sector is serious about defending the diversity and distinctiveness of its teaching, it must provide robust and comparable information about what students can expect," the report says.
The report warns that otherwise, "fewer contact hours may cause students - particularly international students - to consider that their degrees represent poor value for money", and could lead to the perception that English degrees are inferior.
Audit method
The report says that institutional audits have "many strengths", but that audit reports are technical and of limited use to a wider audience. In addition, the QAA's communication style is criticised as "inaccessible" to the general public.
Anthony McClaran, the new chief executive of the QAA, said that in future the agency had to use "language that people can understand". But he added: "It would be wrong for the QAA simply to become part of a marketing effort for British higher education. Its independence must mean that when it finds elements that are not satisfactory, it is able to comment on them."
The report adds that the six-year audit cycle allows problems to go unaddressed for too long, and that in future audit should be able to respond to concerns when they arise. The current cycle comes to an end in 2011.
Dr Selby said he did not expect a revised system to increase red tape: "Increasing the audit burden is no guarantee that you are doing anything to raise quality. This is about designing a system that is effective and secures public confidence."
rebecca.attwood@tsleducation.com
IF IT AIN'T BROKE ... QAA rejects MPs' criticisms
MPs' calls for radical reform of the Quality Assurance Agency would create a "monolithic" higher education system that would stifle pedagogic creativity, the standards watchdog has said.
This summer, a report from the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee declared the system for safeguarding university standards "unfit".
But in its official response this week, the QAA said that the current regime, under which the main responsibility for academic standards rests with individual institutions, with the watchdog checking their work, remains "the best and most cost-effective" approach.
With 40,000 higher education courses in England alone, it is "unrealistic" to expect an annual assessment of the standards of each by an external agency, the QAA added.
Most allegations made through the QAA's "causes for concern" procedure "turned out to be personal-grievance cases" that were ineligible for inquiry, the agency said.
Readers' comments
"while there is "no systemic failure" in the sector, allegations of poor quality pose a serious risk to its reputation..." --- What a ludicrous statement! First of all, there are, indeed systemic failures in the sector, as evidenced by the DIUS Select Committee's recent report which found such failures, and by the numerous instances of compelling press articles, supported by clear and copious evidence supplied by whistleblowers throughout the UK. As the source of information leading to a successful QAA Cause for Concern inquiry into efforts by a UK university to pressurize an external examiner into changing a highly critical report, and the source of evidence leading to HEFCE's removal from league tables of a university department following attempts to pressurize its students into falsifying responses to the National Student Survey, I am able to say with some degree of confidence that the problems with quality in British HE are endemic, and widely accepted as genuine. To suggest that the principal consequence for British HE are merely damage to its reputation is to trivialize the inherent seriousness of such lapses in quality, turning this latest effort by HEFCE into one large PR campaign for the sector, rather than a genuine reform of standards. For shame!
It is interesting that 'radical change' for HEFCE relates to: external examiners, contact time and learning hours, and audit methods. The most important aspect is not addressed: the quality of senior management, i.e. those who make the day-to-day executive decisions on how to run the show. Somehow, this is not part of the 'radical change' needed. Chinese proverb: When the finger points to the moon, the idiot looks at the finger. The endemic problems that exist in some English HEIs will not be reduced or eliminated unless the quality of management is addressed. I am confident there are many academics out there who would 'grade' their senior managers with "limited... confidence". In this context, HEFCE's plans sound increasing like moving the deck chairs on the Titanic...
And HEFCW's take on all of this is...?
I think Dr Frederics is right on the money. This, unfortunately, is the attitude that has been prevalent after twelve years of a Labour government - if you do not like the way the results look, then simply revise the way they are measured until you do. This enables people to look away from the serious issues - which might require fundamental policy revision - and still appear to be making a success of things. Of course, the public are the people who lose out. Such, I'm afraid, is life.
So, P-J, what would you do instead? Communes all round? Works for Oxbridge colleges, I suppose, but then they have a huge fat cushion of money to sit on. Bringing in 'competent' management might lead to the old king log/king stork problem...
More empire building. The bottom line is that, despite assurances to the contrary, this absolutely will devolve onto the academic staff - it will mean extra layers of bureaucracy, and, with only so many hours a day, will detract further from teaching and learning. It's down to the public to ask themselves if, in these impoverished times, they feel like paying for this.
Just one question - what is the standard unit of "learning effort" so that i can include it in my next module descriptor edit? Because, you know, what can't be measured can't be improved. But, hang on, students are customers, so they are always right, by definition. Nah, what we really need to measure is Teaching Effort. Let's define the Teaching Effort Index, on a scale of 1-10, where 1=[half-arsed seminar-style chat] and 10=[finely honed lecture from Nobel laureate with multimedia learning resources distributed an a free USB stick]. Now we just need to think of some intermediate values, and train up a team of auditors to verify our claims. Annually. Nice. Gotcha.
When Phil Woolas was a headmaster did he fight against the grade inflation in A levels?
I never knew about this sad story. How terrible for Professor El Sayed.
Providing "robust and comparable information about what students can expect" would actually involve deciding what higher education is for - unforunately universities seem content to uncritically peddle government's hyperbole about 'economic progress' and forget scholarly ideals of intellectual discovery - but then there's something a bit dodgy about that, isn't there? UK contact hours may be shorter than in the EU, but that's because we expect students to discover for themselves through independent study, guided by tutors during contact hours. Exchange students inform me that we seem to expect much more than their home institutions in both volume and depth of content of assignments - but how do you quantify that in simple New Labour metrics?
Nothing bad is ever systemic or institutional. This was known for years, it was known in Soviet Russia and in all democratic free countries. In UK, however, it's just not known, because you cannot see it. It's not there. I mean the article that was titled "Institutional corruption in medicine" is not there. See for yourselves, go to http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/325/7374/1232 and you don't see it. The British Medical Journal is there, but the article is not there.
Where is the story? It is gone! Also the post by Pierre Joseph Proudhon is gone! Does anyone know why?
Politicians dumb down school education. Universities accuse politicians of dumbing down. Politicians deny dumbing down. Universities forced to dumb down. ...... Politicians accuse universities of dumbing down. Universities deny dumbing down.
Since Hefce report suggests communication needs to be improved in order to build trust amongst the people, it seems odd that in http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/sep/26/administration-universityfunding it is reported that vast numbers of those very people in who trusts needs be built are clamouring at the gates for entry to these untrusted institutions, with non EU admissions too doubling in a decade. A storm in a very enclosed inwardly rounded teacup, perhaps?