Long time, no blog. Another year, another Institutional Audit, this time combined with a dose of (suspected) swine flu. I don’t recommend mixing the two. The side effects of the drugs are unpleasant…and the Tamiflu isn’t great either…
While I have been dealing with audit symptoms and flu processes, HEFCE has published its consultation document on the process to be used when this cycle of audit comes to an end: http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2009/09_47/
But what caught my eye, or rather my ear, this morning was the Today programme interview with Professor David Metcalf, chairman of the Migration Advisory Committee:
0712 The government’s chief immigration adviser has called for a review of “lower tier” colleges over fears that too many foreign students are being given visas at the end of their degree courses. Professor David Metcalf said he was “stunned” to discover hundreds of colleges which were not “proper” universities could grant two-year work and residence visas to non-EU students. Professor Metcalf discusses visa system.
In the course of the interview, Professor Metcalf indicated that he had ‘raised an eyebrow’ about the quality of some of the institutions and programmes listed under the visa system. This struck me as a peculiarly British approach to quality management that could be submitted to HEFCE as part of its consultation. Forget the verdicts required by the current process on ‘confidence’/'limited confidence’ and ‘no confidence’ in the quality and standards of higher education institutions – let’s look forward to a regime under which audit teams might ‘raise an eyebrow’ at an institution, possibly going so far (in extreme cases only) as to ‘tut audibly’.
Forgive the flippancy – serious stuff, requiring serious consideration…just not from me, not this week.
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)
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
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.
…to quote an academic colleague on quality management of collaborative provision (his hanging preposition, not mine!).
I attended a really engaging presentation from Kathleen Kwan of Mills and Reeve to the Quality Practitioners Group of the Academic Registrars Council on due diligence for collaborative provision in higher education with some useful general principles and some helpful items to consider:
recognise that collaboration takes time – a relationship and trust needs time to grow (like dating!);
trust is expensive- work things out for all eventualities while you are on good terms at the start rather than trying to deal with them when the relationship breaks down (think pre-nup!);
don’t rest a collaboration on one person, make sure it is multi-layered or multi-stranded.
Reputation
get references and read between the lines. Do informal follow-up to probe further;
don’t take the claims at face value (they may say they own the land for the proposed new campus – ask to see evidence);
ask an existing or past partner ‘knowing what you know now, would you do it again?’;
check to see if the partner is the subject of adverse press or litigation (this can be as simple as googling them);
is the professional accreditation of the proposed partner current or pending? Is there a difference between being accredited or a member of an accrediting body?;
spot check information being provided to students to to check on use of institutional name and logo.
Costing/resources
small things add up. Cost out the running costs, e.g. annual visits;
recognise that a new partnership will not earn its keep in the first year;
know the local restrictions e.g. on transfer of money outside a country;
find out if the other party has the resources to deal with a termination of agreement.
Due diligence varies in each case:
learn about the country (politics, economic climate, culture, impact of local laws on tax works and data protection, look at the national systems of QA, know what government approvals and permits are required e.g. permission to operate in India);
look at partners’ objectives and how they align with your own institution;
know the organisation – their understanding of quality, their strengths and weaknesses, sources of funding and how secure/conditional it is, ask for their strategy for developing staff;
small student numbers does not reduce the need for due diligence;
tailor questions to find out what the risks are and identify how they will be managed – be specific and focused.
Managing risk
ask yourself what the foreseeable risks are and what can be done in response, e.g. when sending students abroad as part of a programme, there is an assumption of a different duty of care because they are going outside the environment they might have anticipated when registering. Much of the institution’s obligation can be discharged through giving clear advance information to students to enable them to make informed choices about the environment into which they are entering.
Case study worth noting: Warwick have a single form for covering all the aspects of a collaborative provision proposal. One key question that they ask of potential overseas partners is ‘Do they have the legal capacity to engage with us in the way that they wish to?’ (e.g. Greece – no joint degrees permitted). They also have experience of setting variable validation fees to cover the particular level of support an individual partner might require; of lighter touch variants for collaboration on a module or for an award of another University; and of dealing with partners who are also clients.
Some bullet points from a presentation by Peter Williams, head of the QAA, to the meeting of the Quality Practitioners Group of the Academic Registrar’s Council, December 2008:
In light of recent/current political media debates, the questions he encouraged HE institutions to be considering:
is there really only one degree standard for UK higher education?
is degree classification working? How are we recording student achievement?
what is the impact is the reliance on international student recruitment having on teaching and learning?
are students being short-changed by not having enough contact hours? (On this he advised that the debate really needed to be re-directed towards a more meaningful consideration of learning hours rather than contact hours)
He pointed to the work that was being done at national level:
the reinforcement of the QAA’s causes for concern process;
the investigation of some of the highlighted themes (e.g. assessment, plagiarism, admissions, external examiners) to test out how far the anecdotal concerns that were being expressed were well-founded in practice;
HEFCE sub-group to examine the way in which it was discharging its statutory responsibilities on quality of higher education;
joint activity with UUK and GuildHE to provide a route for identify patterns emerging from audits across the sector and relay information about those within the sector in order to prompt action.
Key factors for the future:
with standards high on the government agenda, the QAA was under pressure to concentrate upon standards and accountability and to be careful in its approach to enhancement;
changes on the horizon: some related to key national personnel (e.g. Heads of UUK and QAA), some related to planned review (e.g. Institutional Audit methodology) and some related to the debate on the independence of the QAA;
the implications of increasing UK activity overseas upon quality management – with the expectation from some overseas governments and some politicians of far greater regulation of UK HE activity overseas, such as certification or accreditation.
A useful chat with a colleague over lunch this week about the potential impact of the European agenda for higher education on the UK sector in the next five year period – and the start of some fruitful discussions about potential for enlisting his help on some internal briefings.
Hitherto, Europe was pigeonholed in my head as Bologna, with particular reference to Diploma Supplements and degree cycles (aka, the British 1 year masters cycle versus the European two year model). To me, and no doubt to a number of my academic colleagues, this feels like a highly technical discussion that is the purview of specialists in student records or quality management.
With the implementation of Bologna, and the future European agenda around lifelong learning, the fog is starting to clear and I’m starting to see some of implications in terms that will have more relevance to the thinking of the academic community .For example,
if European employers start to stipulate that they will only recognise ‘accredited’ or ‘recognised’ qualifications, what might the implications be for an institution that is currently both international and currently uses high graduate employability as part of its marketing strategy?
one of the mechanisms by which degree programmes (rather than institutions) become ‘recognised’ internationally is likely to be through accrediting bodies, and international concordats between national accrediting bodies for mutual recognition. What might the implications of this be for an institution which has a high number of professional accreditations?
These questions and others may form a useful entre to facilitating an institutional discussion of the European agenda and what it means in terms of University strategy.
Universities UK has published a new guide to quality and standards structures in higher education.
The BBC has picked up on the publication as universities rejecting more scrutiny in the face of parliamentary scrutiny and political and media debate on degree standards, use of external examiners and admissions requirements.
The UUK publication is one of the first signs of the HE sector taking concerted steps to defend itself publicly against recent political attacks and do something to ensure that what universities as institutions do in terms of quality management is understood more widely.
Will it work? The UUK report/summary guide may provide a useful cribsheet for the insiders in HE and politics who have to engage in the detailed debate about standards but for a more general audience it may make rather dry reading, and is of course open to the interpretation implied by the BBC article, essentially ‘well they would say that wouldn’t they?’.
In a different context, in our team meeting this morning, we were discussing how we in a central service department work with academic departments. We recognised that we take a multi-layered approach, working with different people through a number of different departmental and institutional channels to communicate key messages and support change. It struck me that this micro example has parallels on a macro scale.
Getting the message across about what universities do, and why we can be trusted to get on and do what we do, is also going to take a multi-layered approach. We not only need to clarify the mechanics of what we do in terms of quality management (as the UUK report does), but also continue to make every effort to support the creation of a more positive general discourse about the transforming effects of higher education and the contribution of higher education culturally, socially, educationally (and yes, economically).
When our athletes gain gold medals in international competition, they are rightly lauded for their success. UK universities are among the best in the world and yet I’m not sure that we are getting that message across effectively enough and encouraging wider society to celebrate it with us.
I’m not making a claim of perfection for higher education, and I’m certainly not saying we should stop striving to improve, but in entering a debate about quality and standards, let’s ensure we steer the direction of the debate by communicating clearly about what higher education is for and its fundamental health, as well as focusing on the detail of individual quality mechanisms to ensure its development in the future.
Okay, so this post doesn’t exactly do what it says on the tin! This is more about my attempt to identify and explain what that everything might be….
After a number of weeks of Audit-related ’stuff’ (it’s a technical term), I have a short period in which to focus back on internally-facing quality management work. One current project is to pull together an introductory document for members of staff new to quality management at Bath. They might be new to the University or new to a role that means they have a new part to play in our quality management structures.
As a result, I’m trying to extricate myself from the circular self-referencing quality management jargon, and a head too full of detailed specialist knowledge, in order to think about what it might have been useful to know if I were back at the start of my career here….starting to see the problem?? I’m in the best position to write this because I know where the signs need to point, but in the worst position because I carry around in my head a quite scary array of detail about University structures, processes and precedents (note to self: must get another hobby).
I have a fairly simple core structure in mind, and I want this to be a short document that acts as a starting point giving coherence to and signposting existing, more detailed documents and sources of advice:
what is quality management in learning and teaching? Why is it important?
what principles underpin quality management at Bath?
signposts to key processes
signposts to key documents
signposts to key people.
My problem is with the execution – I keep getting distracted into describing the whole of the University’s governance structure, or adding in reference to another process on the grounds that it is ‘key’. The danger is of losing sight of essentials and ending up with a document that overreaches its remit and doesn’t fulfil its purpose.
Then I move on to the issue of who to consult – how new is new enough to capture that sense of ‘oh, so that’s how it works’ or experienced enough to nod and say’ yes, it would have been helpful to know that’?
Long time, no blog. Another year, another Institutional Audit, this time combined with a dose of (suspected) swine flu. I don’t recommend mixing the two. The side effects of the drugs are unpleasant…and the Tamiflu isn’t great either…