Developing Quality Systems in Education

Geoff Doherty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415098298
• eBook ISBN: 9781134961412
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educational institutions have not escaped the influence of the quality movement, and the FE sector in particular is now being actively encouraged to introduce the BSI's quality assurance standard BS5750. Universities and schools are also attracted by a standard which should improve, if not quality itself, then the management of quality. This book presents an overview of the pitfalls and problems of implementing quality standards in education. It explores theoretical issues, such as the relationship between the customer and academic culture. It also has a strong practical theme, looking at the advantages and disadvantages of quality systems, case studies of attempts at implementation and proposals for future developments across the education sector as a whole.

Part I
Some general and theoretical issues

1
Introduction

The concern for quality

Geoffrey D.Doherty

THE QUALITY JUNGLE

There is nothing unusual about educationists having concerns for quality. This has been going on for a long time—certainly since Plato’s training programme for the Guardians in The Republic (vii). However, since the White Paper, Education and Training for the Twenty-first Century of 1991 there has been a massive burgeoning of interest in what some cynics these days refer to as the ‘quality business’. We now have a plethora of custodians of quality, all of whom are at least to some extent legitimated by the Education Reform Act of 1988, the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992 as well as the White Paper with its concerns for quality and accountability. The latter, particularly, not only referred to levels of quality assurance: quality control, validation and examination, and external assessment, but also specifically mentioned quality systems—BS 5750 and Total Quality Management (TQM), of which more later

Merely to list some of the quality custodians in the United Kingdom makes daunting reading:

Higher Education Funding Council, England (HEFCE)

Higher Education Funding Council, Wales (HEFCW)

National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ)

Scottish Vocational Education Council (SCOTVEC)

Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC)

Further Education Funding Council (FEFC)

Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE)

Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI)

Local Education Authority Advisers Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce (RSA)

Business and Technician Education Council (BTEC) Schools Examination Advisory Council (SEAC)

City and Guilds (C & G)

This is not to mention professional bodies, such as the English Nursing Board (ENB) or the Law Society, which exert considerable influence over the validation and accreditation of qualifications providing exemptions from professional examinations. These bodies are representative of a wide range of external stakeholders in the quality of various forms of educational provision. The United Kingdom is by no means exceptional in this respect, as a glance at the contents of the report of the 1991 Hong Kong Conference on Quality Assurance will confirm (Craft 1992). This has led to some exasperation amongst academics: ‘the quality vocabulary is the one that must be learned by any aspiring academic who wishes to escape from the increasingly arduous daily chore of actually teaching more and more students’ (Editorial, Higher Education Quarterly 1992) and to The Higher setting up a fairly regularly recurring item entitled ‘Quality Debate’. The contributions range from short letters to full-scale articles and allow acerbic academics either to let off steam or make serious contributions, or both. One of the early articles (Brennan and Silver 1992) raised a whole series of questions about the future of quality assurance ‘posed by the CNAA’s demise’. These included: peer review; approval of external examiners; external subject experts; regular course review; sectoral development services; training programmes; and student feedback. They also raised, but did not pursue in depth, several other issues, including quality management, which are addressed in a variety of ways in the subsequent chapters of this book:

will it become more important to know where someone has studied rather than what they have studied or what class of degree they have obtained? How will questions of access and opportunity relate to the overall pattern of provision, and not just to that of individual institutions? Will honours classifications survive a significant increase in student numbers? Is a transcript system on the cards? Can the British system of external examiners safeguard comparability and resist hierarchies becoming more pronounced?…Questions of quality are at the heart of the concerns. The ghosts of the CNAA may well not be confined to a building in Gray’s Inn Road.

The implications of some of these statements—Records of Achievement; open access; changing concepts and measures of quality—resonate for further education and schools as well as for higher education. Subsequent letters argue the pros and cons of HEFCE versus HEQC methodologies, ownership of quality teaching as a business transaction, and so on (Armitage 1993; Jack 1993; Hibbert 1993; Sparkes 1993) but perhaps the most despairing statement emanates from Fred Inglis (1993): ‘There are no books on my desk, only quality papers. These are the dry thoughts of their dry season. Let virtues be forced upon us by their impudent crimes.’ Indeed, it is interesting to speculate how Eliot (1948) and Leavis (1943) might have contributed to this debate.

It is also tempting to look for straightforward, simplistic reasons for the development of this veritable forest of quality assurance trees. Elton (1992) provides a succinct and attractive theory based on the breakdown of mutual trust between the government and higher education in particular, but the argument holds good for the education system in general. He interprets the old British University Grants Committee (UGC) as a buffer which stood between the government and the universities for sixty years. However, in 1969 Shirley Williams, the Secretary of State for Education, put forward thirteen discussion points with the intention of introducing some economy into the university system. They were rejected out of hand by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP). This was the beginning of the ‘erosion of mutual trust’, and readers will be aware that somewhat later the Prime Minister, James Callaghan—in his famous Ruskin College speech of 1976—initiated the ‘Great Debate’ about education in schools. The root concerns were: educational standards; education for work; ‘value for money’; and these were just as much matters of concerns for the Labour Party as they were, subsequently, for the so-called Thatcherite Tories. This general decline in trust is well documented in Maclure (1988). In the university system relationships deteriorated further until the UGC ‘was replaced in 1987 by the Universities Funding Council…an arm of government. By now trust had disappeared completely and been replaced by imposed rules’ (Elton 1992:25).

He considers these rules which lead to quality audit, quality assessment and the use of performance indicators and concludes by drawing comparisons between the United Kingdom and other countries: ‘in Britain, the Secretary of State for Education and Science has given it as his view that “the best means of steering the system is using money; institutions are more likely to do things they will get money for” (MacGregor 1991)’ (Elton 1992:26). This is a policy which is still pursued by the current Minister (John Patten) in respect of Fee Band 1 students in 1993: the drop in fees to £1,300 represents a 31 per cent cut for humanities and social science students. Elton also makes the point that this methodology is not used in either Germany or the United States. However, there is some evidence that, in the United States at least, the situation may change. In another ‘Quality Debate’ article, Lucy Hodges quotes the president of an American university on the subject of future freedom from federal government control of the accreditation system: ‘I cannot make predictions, because of the cost of higher education, the pressure that is coming from the public and certainly from government officials to give assurance that universities and colleges are spending their time effectively serving students’ (25 February, 1993).

More recently, in an editorial (April 1993) ‘Right questions or quality’, it is pointed out that, ‘Despite endless talk of teaching quality, the fundamental issue “Is this a good teacher?” has been disregarded’. The editorial was a response to the results of a Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES) (Loder 1992, 1993) report on quality in higher education research project. It concludes:

The CHES policy paper has made a timely intervention into the quality debate, by pointing out that quality may be a buzz-word in higher education, but it is in danger of becoming just a background noise. Universities and individual staff need to face up to the pressing issue of training before the Government decides to do it for them.

(Higher Education Quarterly, April 1993)

The continuing issue of trust applies equally to the rest of the education system in the United Kingdom and has made considerable impact on quality assurance and self-management in schools (Johnston 1992):

It is specifically in relation to the issue of trust and respect that the roots of the quality assurance problems in Britain originate. Trust begets trust in a web of circularised interrelationships. Teachers and schools see central government as having lost trust in their ability to meet society’s needs and to be responsive to the continually renewing demands this makes in terms of educational provision.

(1992:173)

This issue of trust is taken up by Peters (1992) in an interesting analysis of the application of managerialist ideology, strategic management and performance indicators to the public sector as a whole, not merely education: ‘it has provided a major rationale for restructuring the whole public sector, for privatisation strategies and the introduction of managerialist techniques and practices’ (p. 127).

Such practices are seen as totally antithetical to the interests, methodologies and goals of groups of persons broadly concerned with enhancing the social good. Nevertheless, the activities and attitudes of the government and, indeed, some of the other stakeholders mentioned earlier in this section can be seen to have hardened over the last decade: just as the academics are now becoming increasingly exasperated with the policy makers, so the policy makers became exasperated with the educationists’ endless capacity for talk without action, for rationalization without, as they saw it, results. Plenty more examples could be quoted: Gorbutt et al. (1991) are entertaining on the ‘myth of rational management’; Becher (1992) provides a plausible rationale for the ‘non-corporate’ university; and Gammage (1992) is interesting on the complexities of education and teacher education which cannot be constrained by ‘simplistic input—output models of education’. Interesting, plausible and convincing as these and other such analyses may be to other academics, they are likely to fall on deaf ears in a system where the stakeholders have lost trust in and therefore sympathy with the providers. Perhaps it is appropriate to conclude this section with an extreme example of the academic knee-jerk reaction to criticism. This is from an editorial in the Higher Education Review in response to the Executive Summary of the Quality in Higher Education Project conducted by the University of Central England (1992). After rubbishing the report and its methodology, the writer concludes: ‘Higher education scarcely needs more definition of quality, criteria, questionnaires and three-year projects. What is required is that academics should know what they are doing, understand the nature of it and do it as well as maybe—together with apt institutional means for making this overt.’

This section has attempted to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the ‘stakeholders’ simply do not believe that the old ‘institutional means’ were apt. It seems we have a problem here.

WHAT IS QUALITY?

Conventional wisdom and common sense demand some discussion of what is meant by ‘quality’ before considering quality systems. One problem, of course, as noted in the first section, is that, given the chance, this is as far as the academic or the educationist will go. The meaning of quality can be discussed ad infinitum since there is no consensus view, thus avoiding the need to do anything: ‘Quality…you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is…. If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn’t exist at all. But for all practical purposes, it does exist’ (Pirsig 1976).

This is the ‘you can’t-define-it-but-you-know-it-when-you-see-it’ argument and a favourite quotation for writers on quality, particularly those who wish to pursue this ‘I-know-it-when-I-see-it’ argument which in certain circumstances leads to those exclusive, if not elitist, attitudes which produce confrontations when quality judgements are being made. Pirsig actually spends the next couple of hundred pages or so exploring its metaphysical, romantic and classical connotations but, whilst the journey may be fascinating, he does not produce much that will help the educational programme designer (there is plenty that might help the programme deliverer), and perhaps his best advice is: ‘Hold quality undefined. That’s the secret’ (1976: 213). Can the academics do better? There is certainly a mounting volume of literature on the subject, some of which follows Pirsig’s advice: for example Cryer (1993) manages to produce a very useful primer for helping universities to prepare for a visit from an HEQC audit team without attempting to define quality at all, though in the foreword Malcolm Frazer writes: ‘Quality in higher education is not the same as satisfying a customer with, for example, the latest model of motor car. Quality in higher education embraces, but is not synonymous with, effectiveness, efficiency and accountability.’

Ellis (1993), in his introduction to Quality Assurance for University Teaching, states, with somewhat more precision: ‘Quality itself is a somewhat more ambiguous term since it has connotations of both standards and excellence’ (p. 3). This is a theme which has been explored at some length in the The Higher’s ‘Quality Debate’, where the word ‘quality’ is, for the most part, used synonymously with ‘excellence’: ‘A clear distinction is needed between “Standards” and “Quality”. T...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• PART I: SOME GENERAL AND THEORETICAL ISSUES
• PART II: HIGHER EDUCATION
• PART III: FURTHER AND VOCATIONAL EDUCATION
• PART IV: SCHOOLS