Workshop on changing quality management structures and systems
A discussion of drivers for change:
streamlining – shortening processes while being more effective
saving money
asking is it necessary? What are the essentials? Looking at fitness for purpose in the context of a changing sector, e.g. new models of provision, such as CPD, employer-led provision, transnational education and collaborative provision, lead us to question the traditional ways in which we do things
changes in emphasis in the sector, e.g. increased emphasis on student involvement in quality processes
evolution of purpose – periodically re-examining accretions over time
Discussion centred around some of the tensions expressed in the current debate around Higher Education standards:
Complacency: the evidence presented by vice-chancellors before the IIUS select committee gave the impression of complacency because the arguments about the excellencein the sector were not perceived as compelling. Some participants asked if defence of the sector was difficult because the sector persisted in upholding a flawed defence based upon a presumption of…
Comparability of standards: As a sector we adhere to the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications (FHEQ), the foundation of which is the comparability of standards between institutions. This is the ‘Is a degree from Oxford worth the same as a degree from Oxford Brookes’ question. Some participants saw this assumption of comparability as damaging to the sector and saw the way forward as being a recognition that institutions and disciplines are different
Co-operation: There was general agreement among participants that a common public message was needed from the sector to defend the sector from further state intervention and to reassure the public
Competition: Finding a common message for the sector was acknowledged to be difficult when institutions are essentially in competitition with each other
Communication: the sector needs to articulate what ‘graduateness’ is, and to provide better information to prospective students and stakeholders on the variety on offer within the sector in order to enable informed choice (There is an irony here – in other sectors, such as health, choice is seen as a vitue, but in HE, that variety is seen to be a weakness to be threatened with additional regulation)
The author, Bruce Krajeski, presents this article in the current edition of the Times Higher as as appendix to Cornford’s 1908 Microcosmographia Academicaon being an academic politician.
As Cornford is one of my favourite satires on University life, I read on eagerly. I was disappointed.
Okay, it could be claimed that as an academic administrator myself, I might be sensitive on the subject – am I an adminizombie or a adminimessiah??? Don’t bother to answer that…
Is the microcosmos of administration due a satire or two? Definitely. But for me the article lacks the lightness of touch that characterises Cornford. How can you better this? Compare and contrast with Krajelski’s contribution:
take ‘farewell’ as a hortative staement about saying goodbye to this microcosm in favour of a counter-movement suggested by Kojin Karatani at the conclusion of Transcritique: On Kant and Marx
Huh? Perhaps this is a deliberately impenetrable retreat into jargon, given that one of the author’s arguments centres on the ‘tautologies and distortions of language that take place in the administrative microcosmos’. Clearly, I’m simply too much of an administrator to get the joke.
The article is illustrated with pictures of Byzantine sultans. That’s just lazy picture editing. If you’re claiming that the ways of administration are Byzantine then go for it, but don’t take as your starting point an Edwardian classic based on life in Cambridge and then just throw in a sultan or two for good measure because the word Byzantine occurs in the text. The word cupcake appears in the text on a similar number of occasions, but I don’t see pictures of iced cakey-goodness. See? Just plain disappointing.
This was a discussion around the mechanisms and culture of student engagement with a particular focus upon how we reach students who are not 18-24 yr old undergraduates. As a group, we realised that we knew very little about the expectations of those students, the ways in which they might wish to engage, or the limits they wished to place on their own engagement.
Certain types of engagement might be there (e.g. part-time students attending block teaching intensives who give very rich feedback on module evaluations but who do not engage with student liaison committees) but we are not recognising it. We recognised that we were trying to fit very different student constituencies into a single student engagement model and then becoming concerned when these models don’t reach certain types of groups. There is some learning to be done here about the flexibility of institutional models for student engagement and how far these take into account the diversity of the student body.
The challenge is not just for the institution alone but also for the student body – Students’ Unions are not typically good at representing the diversity of their own student constituencies.
This flags an underlying challenge on a broader scale: in a higher education system which has typically defined ‘graduate-ness’ and the student experience as residential, youth-centred and broader than the degree itself – what is the shape and content of the ‘student offer’ to a part-time student, a distance learner, a cpd student?
Student engagement also challenges our notions of the shape and content of quality management. To a student the student experience is a single whole containing aspects that we pigeonhole as academic, academic related and non-academic (put simply, lectures, libraries and car parks!) . The feedback we get from students covers this continuum and factors in one area can affect satisfaction or engagement in another. One potential question in quality management therefore may be about why and how we maintain boundaries between different quality mechanisms for academic provision and for non-academic services.
A few snippets of practice from elsewhere in the sector:
A Students’ Union planning to bring an annual equivalent of the (Audit) Students Written Submission forward for response by its institution
Use of regular open meetings for students with senior managers including the Vice-Chancellor
An audit of the types and quality of student participation through all different methods and channels in an institution in order to map what occurs where and what is effective
Division of agendas for Student Experience Committees into academic and non-academic items, with precedence given to non-academic items
Rotating committee meetings around various campuses and times to enable a range of students to join in
Okay, so the transcription of my notes from this meeting is a little less than swift, but I recalled some of the points made in the session about ‘The future of the student learning experience’ in light of the recent publication of the Select Committee report on students and universities, and the publication of this year’s NSS results.
I have to say that the half day meeting was something of a disappointment – if this was about the accountability of the Academy to its subscribers, it did not deliver; and if the purpose was to debate the implications for institutions of the future of the student learning experience, then presentations on national enquiries into HE (of varying length and quality) did not bring the focus down to the necessary level. However, I did take away the following points:
the contention from Paul Ramsden, Chief Executive of the Academy, that standards are best guaranteed by autonomy, and that an instrumental approach to education was not incompatible with a life-changing experience, but that there was a need to be able to communicate this and look at how the impact of the work of HEIs is measured. There was an unanswered question connected with this about how far the Academy has a role in speaking up on behalf of the HE sector;
from Merfyn Jones of Bangor University, a challenge: how to demonstrate accountability for investment of public funding, while retaining autonomy; how to incorporate skills while retaining the concept of education; and how to balance the tension of workplace planning and economic contribution with students’ choices about their personal development;
from Bernard King of the University of Abertay on the work of the Future Thinking Task Group in Scotland, the outcomes of which are to re-affirm the indivisibility of teaching and research, the expectation that HE will drive the economy, and a concept of ‘graduateness’ that is not just about a qualification. This connects with a re-conceptualisation of the role of the university in developing ‘graduateness’ and the indivisibility of teaching and research;
prescient comments from Aaron Porter of the NUS who predicted that student satisfaction as measured in the NSS would decline this year in light of the twin factors of the first cohort of students who had paid top-up fees, graduating in an environment where employability did not offer the type of benefits they might have expected from their ‘investment’. He argued that institutions should be supporting students to articulate more effectively the full range of skills and benefits (not just money or jobs) they derived from their learning experience.
Students took turns as “directors for a day”, gaining classroom experience by emulating the professor. They were expected to deliver original presentations based on novel research rather than parrot the shopworn arguments of their predecessors. Often they picked their own topics instead of having them assigned by the professor. Peer pressure and competition for professorial approval induced them to take on the most difficult research problems and tackle them assiduously.
Nor did we find any interest in testing the assumptions that pervade the sector—for example, that there is a link between carrying out research and the quality of teaching.
I’m in the final stages of preparing for joint delivery of a workshop for an EU Tempus project looking at how a quality unit relates to the institution and how quality management works in practice.
The two key points we are trying to convey are about ensuring that the approach to quality fits the academic culture, and about how to engage the academic community in quality management so that it is owned rather than imposed.
Rather dry subject matter, I admit. thankfully I was rescued by a far more imaginative colleague who put me on the track of a musical analogy. As a result (and technology permitting) I hope to illustrate the point with the contrast in between a marching band and a jazz ensemble.
In some organisations it may be possible to get everyone marching in the same direction, at the same time and to the same tune.
In my experience of academia and of quality management, you’re doing pretty well to get to the level of the jazz band, where individuals function more loosely as an ensemble, riffing and improvising around the same tune.
It’s not a new phenomenon of course. In the nineteenth century students who wished to do well in University examinations enlisted the services of private coaches. A coach like William Hopkins was known as ‘the senior wrangler-maker’ for his ability to assist men to the top of the University examination league table.
In many cases, the employment of coaches was less about dissatisfaction with the standard of teaching, but rather the absence of teaching. For example, in Cambridge in the early nineteenth century, there was little college teaching, no inter-collegiate teaching and no University teaching aimed at undergraduates.
Aside from a wry amusement over cycles of history and concerns about further media coverage on deficiencies in teaching provision, this story draws me into thinking about the contrast between narrow and broad conceptions of the functions of higher education. I am reminded of a reflection by John Venn on one of the coaches he employed as an undergraduate in Cambridge in the 1850s. He described the man as fairly well up in his subject but lacking ‘the power of originality that was desirable’. The coach was able to teach the required knowledge but did not facilitate the learning of a more general critical approach.
In the current day, with universities being urged by Government to ensure that their courses are relevant to the workplace and students are perceived to be taking an increasingly instrumental view of their degrees, there is a parallel tension. At last week’s Higher Education Academy conference, Alison Halstead (Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Aston University) argued that students needed more than knowledge of their subject, but rather the skill of learning to learn and being adaptable to changing environments. In an article for Teaching in Higher Education, Molesworth, Nixon and Scullion make a similar critique, pointing to the link between ‘marketisation’ of Higher Education and a narrower pedagogical approach that limits broader personal development and transformation.
What happened in the nineteenth century? In light of public criticism and the perceived failure of Oxford and Cambridge’s attempts to reform themselves, the Government intervened with Royal Commissions to restructure teaching and finances. Hmmm, moving swiftly on….
No one can tell the difference between a Liberal Conservative Caucus and a Conservative Liberal one. There is nothing in the world more innocent than either. The most dare-devil action they ever take is to move for the appointment of a Syndicate ‘to consider what means, if any, can be discovered to prevent the Public Washing of Linen, and to report, if they can see straight, to the Non-placets.’ The result is the formation of an invertebrate body, which sits for two years, with growing discomfort, on the clothes-basket containing the linen. When the Syndicate is so stupefied that it has quite forgotten what it is sitting on, it issues three minority reports, of enormous bulk, on some different subject. The reports are referred by the Council to the Non-placets, and by the Non-placets to the wastepaper basket. This is called ‘reforming the University from within.’
A short blogging drought while I removed myself from Bath to Newcastle to take up a new role as Head of Quality in Learning and Teaching.
It’s strange being a new girl again – recognising the big picture ’stuff’ like political debates on quality management, discussions of the balance between research and teaching or the relationship between academic and administrative roles, but being slower than a really slow thing when it comes to everyday things, like knowing which route to take across campus or finding an envelope.
As well as getting to grips with a new environment, I’m trying to understand a manage a new team, budget, structures and communication; identify the ‘academic grain’ of a new institution; grapple with the deliveryof existing projects, and develop a sense of where the emerging priorities lie.
I’m also looking back – trying to pull together my thoughts on what I have learned professionally from my time at Bath. I find I keep slipping into lists of things done or knowledge acquired- completed PhD, became an audit secretary, survived an institutional audit etc. This may need to be the start of an ongoing list, but at least it’s a start. I have -
developed my own sense of professional identity. I emerged from Warwick thinking that was how academic administration was done, and I still remain committed to many of the elements of the ‘Warwick way’. During my time at Bath, I had the chance to consider and defend certain values, acquire new role models and observe different approaches in action – I identify myself as a generalist by intellectual as well as professional inclination, seeing the strength in understanding how parts of an organisation/service fit together as a broader whole, and I am strongly committed to a robust professional partnership with academic colleagues and student representatives (The professional administrator as Ginger Rogers? Able to do everything Fred Astaire did but in reverse and in high heels? There is of course the thorny issue of who should lead….). I aspire to but don’t always achieve the intellectual strength that comes from a combination of grasp of detail and bigger picture, and the grace that characterises some of the administrators I most admire;
thought more coherently about the type of higher education to which I am committed and best suited. Not all of it is fashionable – a hint of John Henry Newman, anyone? – but it’s what I think of as home;
realised that a little clarity of expression and structure, whether in policy or personnel management, can go an awfully long way;
sought to understand the intersecting layers of academic culture (back to working with the academic grain again!) - looking at the prerequisites of achieving cultural as well as structural change , as well as how momentum can be built through activity on a number of levels.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=408553&c=2
