| AQ 97 |
Proceedings of the AQ 97 Conference
Winchester, 2 December 1997
What should institutions and academics do in response to the Dearing Report?
Peter Wright
Assistant Director
Quality Assurance Agency
[email protected]
The first question that we should consider is the present standing
of the Dearing Report and its recommendations, particularly those relating to
standards and quality. I want to reject two extreme positions on this matter.
The first is the view that the report is simply one contribution to the formation of the Government's policy, and that nothing is predictable until after the publication of the White Paper (which has now slipped to mid-January 1998). I believe that such a view is naive because it would appear to assume that the Government has some other set of recommendations up its sleeve, or is confronted by some powerful lobby with its own proposals. I see nothing of the kind and believe it is highly probable that the White Paper, or accompanying letters, will simply commend Dearing's recommendations to those to whom they are addressed. Any of the Report's recommendations that the Government does not favour will, I imagine, simply be allowed to slip into oblivion.
The second position that I reject is one that regards the Dearing report as providing an unchallengeable programme for quality assurance and standards in UK higher education up until the year 2001: the implementation date for some of the recommendations. My reason for doing so is not simply that past experience suggests that educational policies seldom survive intact for four years. (That was true even in the more leisurely days of the early sixties: within eighteen months of the publication of the Robbins Report, Anthony Crosland overturned its principal recommendation in his April 1965 speech at Woolwich, which set forth the binary policy for higher education.) In addition to this historical perspective, it seems to me that the conjunction of forces within higher education today is inherently unstable.
Let us consider these forces. To begin with, there are the institutions: which are my main concern today. A great deal hangs, in my opinion, on how far institutions are prepared - individually or in groupings - to take forward the issues that have arisen from the debate about quality and standards over the last three or so years. If they appear to be holding back, or to be responding grudgingly, it seems to me that that will play into the hands of the most intrusive and dirigiste groups within the central bodies and Government; and I suspect that these are increasingly numerous.
Then there are the Representative Bodies (CVCP, COSHEP, SCOP, etc.). I think it unlikely that they will play a major part in shaping the emerging system because they lack the resources to do so and, especially in the case of the CVCP, they are too divided internally. But account needs also to be taken of a new player that has been born out of the Dearing recommendations: the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. There can no doubt that this will be established and running by the autumn of 1998. Although that will constitute an important advance, the Institute seems likely to be overwhelmingly preoccupied during its early years with the accreditation of programmes for teachers in higher education, and thus unable to make much general impact on other matters.
Next we come to my own agency, the QAA. As you will be aware, the Dearing recommendations present us with a very considerable programme of work to be undertaken within a very brief timescale. It remains to be seen whether this can be achieved on time without some sacrifice of consultation and sense of ownership of the new arrangements by the academic community. If it cannot, it will be vital, in my view, to ensure that it is the timetable that yields, and not the spirit of consultation and co-operation.
Then there are the higher education funding councils to consider, in particular the biggest, the HEFCE. Some of these councils may imagine that, with the transfer of their quality assessment divisions to the QAA, they will no longer have any significant involvement in quality assurance and standards. I think that would be a mistake. The funding councils are highly conscious of the fact that they have a statutory duty to assure themselves of the quality of the education that they fund; and the HEFCE shows increasing signs of wanting to assess the quality of provision, and to reward that which is judged to be the best. Its recent statements on developmental activities such as the learning and teaching initiative (FDLT) seem further proof of this.
Now, let us turn to the Government. What stance will it adopt on higher education over the next few years? Much is still uncertain but it does seem obvious that - like all governments - it will be exposed to the pressure of unforeseen events and the need to be seen to respond quickly to them. In higher education these events will probably resemble those of recent years: media scares about falling standards and so on. If this happens, as it seems it must, one can hardly suppose that Government will simply sit on its hands and tell the media that all that needs to be done is to wait a few years until the Dearing recommendations take effect, when all such problems will have become things of the past.
In addition to the visible actors there are also two more shadowy forces that may affect how quality assurance and standards arrangements will develop within UK higher education. These are what I shall call the twin legacies of Dearing and of the Graduate Standards Programme (GSP) undertaken by the late Higher Education Quality Council.
The Dearing Report is, in my opinion, a strangely equivocal and elusive document: like a Rorschach test, it enables the reader to perceive in it almost anything that he, or she, is looking for. Even the report's recommendations seem to be conjured out of little more than thin air: unexplained, unargued, unelaborated and, most importantly, unevaluated. In the absence of any authoritative interpreter (Sir Ron himself has eschewed the role) the Report seems set to give rise to a succession of conflicting readings. It may well be that the debate of the years to come will take the quasi-theological form of competing exegeses of the Good Book.
The Report of the Graduate Standards Programme, though less well known or commentated on than the Dearing Report, continues to exert influence. Some would argue, indeed, that the three-year process of investigation, consultation and deliberation that it involved did much to change the climate of opinion within higher education and to bring the topic of standards into prominence. Nonetheless, the relationship of the two reports to each other is uneasy. Certainly there can be no doubt that Dearing drew heavily on the findings of the GSP: to such an extent, indeed, that there are close textual parallels in places. Nonetheless, there are some important differences. In particular, the GSP came to the judgement that the delineation of threshold standards would not be generally possible until there had already been significant moves towards clarity, explicitness and strengthened peer judgement. Dearing, in contrast, simply recommended that threshold standards be identified without alluding to the reservations expressed in the GSP report. It may be that these reservations come to haunt future attempts to implement some of the Dearing proposals.
As I have already suggested, I think the final anatomy of the future arrangements for quality assurance and standards in UK higher education is difficult to predict because it will be the outcome of the interplay of forces that I have just described. Nonetheless, in my judgement this outcome is still open. For the time being, institutions continue to have everything to play for, although this may soon cease to be the case if they do not respond vigorously.
I have no doubt that Sir Ron Dearing spoke from the heart when he presented his report as representing a new "compact between higher education and society", which would "reflect their strong bond of mutual independence: a compact which in certain respects could with advantage be made more explicit" [Main Report, Introduction, para 1.27]. What I doubt is whether the necessary conditions yet exist for the achievement of that 'compact'. As I have already argued, this vision will only be achievable if the component parts of higher education - the institutions, and subject-based bodies, and the academics who constitute them both - are quite extraordinarily proactive, prompt and confident in responding both to the new standards agendas in general and the Dearing/GSP recommendations in particular. If institutions wait for others to give the lead - whether Government, the Representative Bodies or national agencies - there is, I believe, a real danger that UK higher education will drift, by default, into a demoralizing cycle of prescription, compliance and dissembling: a world of central inspection and of the Potemkin villages to which it tends to give rise.
What then, exactly, are the post-Dearing challenges to higher education institutions? Of Dearing's exhaustive total of 93 recommendations 26 are identified as directed to "institutions and their governing bodies", second only - and perhaps revealingly - to the 49 recommendations to Government. Those aimed at institutions are extremely diverse, and range from the general and vague (institutions to review their programmes to secure a "better balance between breadth and depth ... than currently exists": Recommendation 16) to the surprisingly detailed (institutions to "negotiate reduced telecommunications tariffs on behalf of their students": Recommendation 45). Surprisingly, some of the key recommendations on quality and standards such as No. 22 (which calls for endorsement of the national qualifications framework) are not, apparently, directed to institutions individually despite the fact that many have a chartered right to determine and award qualifications.
I have tried to analyse the 26 Dearing recommendations to institutions into clusters of cognate issues with the following slightly arbitrary results (in certain cases a particular recommendation might be classified into two or more categories). My results (with the numbers of the recommendations concerned) fall into 8 categories as follows:
Interestingly, few recommendations directly concern what many would regard as the heartlands of education: the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. It seems, perhaps, that institutions may find the Dearing Report more useful as an indicator of the general climate within which they will in future have to operate than as an analysis of the issues that they will need to address in moving towards a 'new compact': if, indeed, that is to be achieved.
What, then, are the central issues that face higher education institutions and demand action in the post-Dearing world? Let me propose six which, I believe, emerge from the rich variety of experience of the last five years; which includes Quality Assessment, Quality Audit, Quality Enhancement, the Graduate Standards Programme and, of course, the Dearing Report itself.
The issues, I suggest, are as follows (I shall touch on each in turn):
The need for clarity and explicitness in higher education are abiding themes of much of the work on quality and standards in the last five years and arise, I would argue, from several causes. These include not only the generalized need for greater accountability within the public services but, specifically, the growing involvement of UK higher education with new groups of clients, which leads to calls for explicitness from potential students, their future employers and the general public that ultimately funds higher education. The consultation on the draft report of the GSP last winter found unopposed support for greater explicitness in the higher education community. Dearing's Recommendation 21 proposing 'programme specifications', emphasizes the need for institutions to take action on the matter. It is now, in my view, up to them to determine how their programmes and awards are to be made clearer and more explicit.
The issue of entry to higher education programmes follows naturally upon that of the clarification of intended outcomes. If the aim is in view and the process to achieve it is known, then the minimum starting point ought surely to be more easily specifiable. But things are not quite like that. Very often, as is widely acknowledged, higher education admission requirements have more to do with balancing the supply and demand for places - serving as a price of entry - than with distinguishing those candidates best able to pursue a programme with success. Although it is assumed - or, perhaps, hoped - that the candidates' suitability will flow from their scarcity, there is mounting evidence that it may not; even programmes that recruit candidates with 25+ A-level points might be able to find better-suited entrants by other means. The challenge to institutions is thus to ensure that they recruit the students best able to benefit from their programmes without recourse to 'scarcity pricing' and in a full understanding of the diversity of the entry qualities that candidates now offer.
Just as emphasis on explicitness tends to cause attention to be directed towards admission criteria, so also does it raise the issue of assessment. In making the intended outcomes of a programme of study clearer and more explicit one necessarily throws into relief the question of how fully these outcomes are captured by the means of assessment employed. There is mounting evidence - much generated by attempts to map vocational qualifications against academic programmes in the same vocational field - to indicate that the relationship of assessment methods to intended outcomes is, at best, often insufficiently explored and, at worst, weak or even contradictory. What is more, such weak or conflicting relationships are not restricted to programmes where aims and outcomes are largely tacit. They are, rather disconcertingly, also to be found in programmes that are set out in terms of learning outcomes. The assessment of students would certainly seem to be a topic to which institutions would be wise to give urgent attention.
The improvement and strengthening of peer judgement is something that has received little overt consideration except in the Graduate Standards Programme (although it would appear to be implicit in the Dearing Report and perhaps to lie behind its recommendations on Expert Teams and Recognized External Examiners: see Recommendation 25). If it is accepted - as it usually is - that a key factor in the valid and reliable assessment of students is the exercise by those undertaking the assessment of consistent and justifiable judgement, then it becomes important to consider the forces that lead to the weakening, or strengthening, of that judgement.
As was indicated by the findings of research undertaken for the GSP [2], the circumstances in which academic peers meet to share or exercise judgements about assessment are becoming fewer and fewer. This appears to be happening because of such factors as changes in course structure (e.g. tiered examination boards), pressure on staff time and greater numbers of students. The impact of these factors is probably exacerbated across higher education as a whole by the general increase in scale and differentiation of the system. The GSP report made various proposals as to how this problem might be lessened or resolved. Essentially, these involved both the creation of new fora in which assessors would discuss their judgements and the grounds for them, and the introduction of specific means (such as the assessment and discussion of exemplar scripts) by which to benchmark assessment standards within, and between, institutions or across a subject. Although the strengthening of peer judgement necessarily requires actions across disciplines and institutions (some of which are now in train) it can begin within individual institutions; indeed, without strong support from them it is unlikely to make greater progress.
Next, of course, comes the well-recognized need to improve learning and teaching. There is widespread agreement that ways must be developed that enable students to learn in an environment of diminishing staff time and falling per-capita funding. It is also recognized, however, that powerful structural and cultural forces hinder such developments: in particular the primacy of research and its manifestations in the Research Assessment Exercise and the promotion decisions of many institutions. Obviously this is not an issue that can be resolved within a single institution nor within a group of institutions; it involves the UK higher education system as a whole and that of other countries too. Nonetheless, significant progress can be - and is being - made at the institutional level. What is more, as students become better informed about the quality of teaching and also more discriminating it seems likely that such progress will be essential to maintain an institution's recruitment.
Finally I turn to the topic of an institution's mechanisms for the validation, monitoring and review of its programmes. This, of course, is a familiar and much-explored subject. Nonetheless it is one, I would suggest, that is far from exhausted. If we accept that the issues discussed above are important, we are then bound to ensure that they constitute the key items for scrutiny in an institution's quality procedures. I am far from convinced that this is generally so at present, particularly because some of these issues have only recently become recognized. For example, I have seen few instances of institutional validation and review mechanisms that deliberately and explicitly consider whether the methods of students assessment employed in a programme fully capture the aims and intended outcomes of the programme. It seems to me that the task of ensuring that an institution's procedures for quality and standards actually do focus on the cardinal issues lies at the heart of the responsible exercise of academic autonomy.
Conclusions
I will conclude by returning to my central argument: the shape of the future arrangements for quality and standards in UK higher education is fluid and still uncertain; but it remains possible for higher education institutions to influence, even determine, those arrangements if they respond vigorously to the challenges facing them.
Note
The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Quality Assurance Agency.
The author asks that this document is not to be cited without his permission.
References
|
© Peter Wright 1997
Published by Information Geometers Ltd |
| Back to the AQ 97 contents list |