The Lecturer's Guide to Quality and Standards in Colleges and Universities

Professor Kate Ashcroft, Kate Ashcroft, Dr Lorraine Foreman-Peck, Lorraine Foreman-Peck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780750703383
• eBook ISBN: 9781135719890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A follow-up volume to "Managing Teaching and Learning in Further Education and Higher Education", this text provides a guide to managing quality and standards from the lecturer's point of view. It covers key issues such as teaching, learning, student support, assessment, evaluation, course design, bidding for and managing resources, marketing and research.; Based on the model of lecturer as reflective practitioner, this book is intended to help enable the lecturer to make sense of the changing climate of quality control and academic standards. Its interactive design introduces stimulating ideas and suggestions for further reading and provides guidelines on issues of relevance to individual readers.

Chapter 1
Introduction

My aim in this book is to provide a basic handbook for lecturers concerned with quality and standards in the post-compulsory education sector with an emphasis on an entrepreneurial climate, but at the same time retaining a clear educational philosophy. This philosophy is based on the model of the lecturer as a reflective practitioner. Reflective in this sense is more than ‘thinking about’, it also includes collecting data about practice and analysing it in the light of the social, moral and political context.

Even inexperienced lecturers can no longer ignore the quality context in which they work. Questions of quality and standards are the business of all those who work in educational institutions. All are concerned with maintaining standards and in documenting quality control processes. If they are to further the interests of students, lecturers have to play a role in defining what ‘quality’ might look like, what standards might be appropriately set and how they might be measured.

This book rests on the premise that ‘quality’ and ‘standards’ are highly problematic; that they may be examined from a number of alternative viewpoints; that these viewpoints and the power each exerts are highly political matters; and that these definitions cannot be separated from the values that underpin them and from the way that they are applied in institutional and individual practice. For this reason I consider several different definitions of quality and standards and intend that the whole book will help you develop an understanding of what ‘quality’ and ‘standards’ mean to you, and how what you do may be influenced by these definitions. My intention in writing the book is to make sense of the changing climate of quality control and academic standards.

I cover teaching, learning and management issues, specifically focused on the concerns of the lecturer. Lecturers manage the work of others, usually students, and thus could be said to have an equivalent role to that of middle managers in industry or commerce. They usually have little management training for this role. I focus on the development of key management skills and understandings necessary to understand, develop and monitor standards and quality in further and higher education, focusing especially on the role of lecturers and course leaders. I also explore ways of looking at the interests of the various ‘audiences’ for this activity (mainly students, but also external assessors, institutional managers, employers, funders and so on). The model of reflective practice I use within this book assumes that professional development will result from a willingness to define the quality of teaching and students’ learning and an interest in issues of standards and their relationship to those of differentiation and individual development and learning.

Background

Reflective practice cannot be divorced from its context, requiring you to deepen your understanding of the institutional and wider political context for your work. I hope to stimulate your interest in these matters and to encourage greater effectiveness within these structures, so that you can use them to the benefit of students and teaching. For instance, in the new climate of further and higher education, staff development, especially as it relates to your teaching and your students’ learning will be given a higher profile. The development of appraisal has been increasingly linked to performance-related pay for the individual and more indirectly to performance indicators for the institution. These assessments are likely to be increasingly related to funding. For example, in the UK, the new division of Quality Audit, which is part of the Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC), will focus exclusively on the quality of the management of teaching, learning and assessment in each institution.

The HEQC and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) have agreed to work more closely (HEQC, 1994) on such matters as documentation requirements; exchange of reports between the two councils; notes of guidance; training of auditors; scheduling of visits; and evaluation. Data from the auditing process will feed into the quality ratings and affect HEFCE funding for individual colleges and universities.

The Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) has instigated similar quality-assessment processes and funding arrangements for further education colleges. It has set up a committee to assess the quality of provision through a system of performance indicators, external inspection and audit of the college’s own systems of quality control. The FEFCE Quality Assessment Committee and its inspectorate will work closely with HEFCE, the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) and Local Authority Associations (LAAs) to ensure consistency of standards, develop clear divisions of responsibility and minimize disruption to institutions which would be caused by multiple inspections (Further Education Funding Council, 1994). The operations of these organizations are described in more detail in Chapter 2.

The emergence of the UK funding councils’ concern with issues of accountability and quality assessment are related to a move from an elite to a mass system of post-compulsory education. Barnett (1994) sees this as resulting from a change in the relationship between education and society and, in particular, the incorporation of post-compulsory education into society’s mainstream. Education has become an economic good, and therefore the concern of Government, employers and education’s ‘customers’, rather than a cultural good, with quality defined by the cultural elite (and academe in particular). This change in the perceived value of post-compulsory education has in turn led to new definitions of ‘quality’ that focus on competence, outcomes, skills and transferability, rather than knowledge, truth, objectivity and the integrity of the discipline.

The discussion of quality and standards is located within a context of education that embraces entrepreneurial activity, in which issues of consistency, fitness for purpose and value for money become as much a part of the quality framework as absolute notions of ‘excellence’.

Ways of Using the Book

You may wish to use the book in various ways. You might use some of the enquiry tasks to collect evidence for an appraisal interview and ideas within the text to analyse the evidence according to your own and institutional criteria for quality. You might wish to work through the book as a professional development text or use it as a reference book to provide another way of looking at a particular problem. In the last case, you may find the synopsis at the end of each chapter is a useful starting point.

Practical exercises intersperse the text, some of which invite you to collect data from within your institution. These are designed to help you understand and use the concepts and to reflect upon the operation of ideas introduced by the text in the context of your own institution and in relation to your own values. Values tend to be so much part of our ‘taken for granted’ view of the world, that it is sometimes hard to examine them without help. For this reason, I suggest that you may need to involve a trusted colleague in some of your enquiry. The entry for the reflective diary at the end of each chapter is designed to enable you to interact with the material presented and analyse your developing ideas.

Because of the broad scope of the book, I am able to introduce only some of the possible perspectives and ideas which may stimulate your thinking and provide a ‘language’ for your analysis. I include an annotated reading list at the end of each chapter, so that you can target your reading and take forward those issues of particular relevance to you.

The Quality Context

With the introduction of a rapid expansion of the system of post-compulsory education in Britain, first in higher education and then in further education, fundamental changes in approach to the problems of teaching and learning have become necessary. Various bodies, such as the Committee of Scottish University Principals (1993), see the solution to problems presented by the new mass system in terms of innovative approaches to the delivery of the curriculum and to the structures needed to support these approaches. These structures included the development of systematic ways of monitoring and enhancing ‘quality’ of provision, in order to ensure that ‘more’ did not mean ‘worse’. The mass system could not easily be monitored through ad hoc systems which have sometimes existed in the past.

One of the most significant features of this debate is the emphasis on the quality of teaching and learning. This is sometimes presented as unproblematic and uncontroversial, as if there were no problems in defining what might be meant by ‘quality’. Alternatively, the notion of ‘quality’ may be presented as in some way synonymous with the elaboration of systems by which it is monitored.

The British Conservative Government of the 1990s introduced terms borrowed from the industrial sector, such as ‘quality control’, ‘quality audit’ and ‘quality assessment’, as if the intention to replace the gentler language and more evolutionary approach suggested by the culture of ‘evaluation’ and ‘critical review’ was part of a politically neutral agenda about ‘getting value for money’ (DES, 1991). This signalled more than a change in rhetoric and has led to real changes in systems and procedures and their relationship to funding. The question of who should assess the quality, who should define it, and so on is now largely determined by the Government and justified in terms of free-market development. This takes place in a market that is essentially not free, where resources are strictly limited, and institutions can be rewarded in one year for responding enthusiastically to student ‘demand’ and penalized in the next.

The direct involvement of Government in the definition of quality clearly has had an effect on the relationship between universities and colleges and the State. This relationship is under great strain at the moment. The tensions are set up by the underlying conflict between the legitimate authority of Government and legitimate academic freedom. In a parliamentary democracy, the Government may properly exercise great authority over the institutions within the State. On the other hand, traditionally, the further and higher education systems have had considerable freedom, and so, in practice, have attained some degree of power. This subsidiarity has come to be valued as a useful check on the centralizing tendencies of Government.

The increasing direction of further and higher education by Government has also affected the lecturer’s relationship with the institution. The academic freedom that has been a traditional feature of the British educational system is sometimes in direct conflict with the interests of the institution, and may even threaten its financial viability. Difficult questions are being asked about the rights and responsibilities of institutions and lecturers and the legitimacy of limitations to academic freedom.

‘Quality’ issues have become more central to institutional concerns. New committees and senior posts have been created as institutions and departments become subject to ‘quality audit’, as wise institutions prepare themselves for teaching and learning to be subjected to a similar rating exercise to that which determines research funding allocations to individual institutions. In any case, the creation of league tables for results (such as ‘A’ Level results from further education colleges) has affected recruitment in some areas, and so certain definitions of ‘quality’ are already having a real influence on resources. In some cases, the debate had focused on issues of institutional self-protection, accountability and control, and deeper issues about criteria for good practice have been neglected.

Quality, Standards and the Reflective Practitioner Model

The model of the Reflective Practitioner underpins the analysis of approaches to quality and standards in further and higher education within this book. I have previously outlined this model (Ashcroft and Foreman-Peck, 1994), which draws on Dewey’s (1916) description of reflective thinking, as developed by Zeichner (1982) and others (Carr and Kemmis, 1986; Isaac and Ashcroft, 1986; Ziechner and Teitlebaum, 1982). The model sees professional development as progressing through a process of critical enquiry and problem-solving, that is in turn dependent upon the development of key qualities: openmindedness; responsibility; and wholeheartedness.

Openmindedness refers to the ability to seek out and evaluate alternative viewpoints. This is seen as a deliberate, and sometimes systematic enquiry into the behaviour and feelings of others which will yield data for the lecturer to assess. This assessment should not be an automatic acceptance of the viewpoints or a rejection of those notions which do not immediately chime with your own, but rather an honest assessment of what they mean for you, for the individuals holding them and for action and development. Openmindedness therefore implies a certain humility in the face of alternative interpretations of practice and contex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Processes In Quality and Standards
• Chapter 3: Quality In Teaching and Learning
• Chapter 4: Student Support
• Chapter 5: Staffing and Staff Development
• Chapter 6: Assessment and Evaluation
• Chapter 7: Course Design
• Chapter 8: Resource Management
• Chapter 9: Marketing and Recruitment
• Chapter 10: Research
• Chapter 11: Conclusion