Quality Assurance in Higher Education

The UK Experience Since 1992

Roger Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781134311958
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Along with funding, quality assurance has become one of the major issues in higher education today. This text provides an analytical account of the changes to quality assurance of UK universities and colleges from 1992 to 2003. It documents the shift from institutional self-regulation to increased involvement of the state and examines the accompanying debate about the purposes, forms and ownership of quality assurance, as well as a wider consideration of the best means of regulating professional activities.All the key developments and issues of quality assurance are covered, including: * the background to thecurrent debates* the evolution of the post-1992 regime* the role of the Higher Education Quality Council (HEQC)* changes to assessment andthe creation of a single system* the formation and likely evolution of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA).Roger Brown writes with an authority derived from his varied experiences inquality assurance. He argues that the external quality regime to date has provided poor value for money, anddraws from the lessons learnt during the 1990s to assess the conditions required for effective regulation.

1 Background and context

The implications of New Public Management ideas in public administration have been contested. Introducing these new ideas in a public university system should make an apt case for the exploration of the potential and limitations of New Public Management as a universal approach to management reform. In higher education where institutional autonomy and academic freedom are fundamental values, the compatibility between the rationale of the reform policies and the substantive field in which they are supposed to operate is posed more acutely than in most other policy fields.
(Bleiklie, 1998)

Introduction

It seems to be generally agreed that, in common with other publicly funded activities, the external regulation of universities has increased in both scope and specificity, particularly since the early 1980s. There have been various attempts to account for this and to assess the benefits and detriments. This chapter outlines the historical context in which the developments covered in the book took place and reviews some of the relevant literature. It concludes by proposing a model for analysing the regulation of universities’ teaching and learning.

UK higher education at 6 May 1991

In May 1991 there were 1.176 million students in UK higher education, 748,000 full-time and 428,000 part-time (Government Statistical Service, 1993: 7). Numbers had risen rapidly since the mid-1980s due chiefly to the success of the new General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in improving retention rates in post-compulsory education and also to the Government’s intention – announced in the Secretary of State Kenneth Baker’s speech at Lancaster University in January 1989 (Baker, 1989) – to expand the system so as to bring UK participation rates into line with those of our major industrial competitors.

These students were to be found at two main categories of institution: the existing universities (including for this purpose the Open University) and the polytechnics and colleges, which formed the so-called public sector of higher education. The latter had absorbed the bulk of the expansion in demand at the cost of a substantial reduction in the unit of funding. As a result, their total student numbers now exceeded those of the established universities: 652,000 students against 524,000 at the existing universities. (Government Statistical Service, 1993: 7).

A major facilitator of this public sector expansion was the incorporation of the polytechnics and colleges through the Education Reform Act 1988, and the subsequent leadership and development of the new sector under Sir Ron (now Lord) Dearing and Dr (now Sir) William Stubbs at the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council (PCFC), the government agency allocating public funds to these institutions. By contrast, and in spite of having their own new funding council (the Universities Funding Council or UFC), the old universities showed not only slow growth but also a distinct reluctance to lower their costs, a factor which was to contribute in no small measure to the Government decision to abolish the distinction between the two groups of institutions.

Both the universities and the polytechnics and colleges were – and in their post-1992 form are – legally autonomous, privately owned organizations. The pre-1992 universities generally have charters, the post-1992 institutions are mostly higher education corporations, a specific category of company created by the 1988 Act. This legal autonomy is particularly important for quality since by law universities are answerable only to themselves for the standards of their awards. This legal autonomy of the institutions can be distinguished from the wider notion of academic autonomy, as the freedom within the law to question received wisdom and put forward new or unpopular opinions, enshrined in section 202 of the 1988 Act (HM Government, 1988).

Government policy towards higher education

The basic theory underlining the creation, terms of reference, composition and modus operandi of the new funding councils was that universities and other higher education institutions had to become both more efficient in their use of resources and more responsive to the needs of the economy. The classic statement of this case came in the 1985 Green Paper on higher education: ‘the Government believes that it is vital for our higher education to contribute more effectively to the improvement of the performance of the economy’ (DES, 1985).

To give effect to this, the 1987 White Paper Higher Education: Meeting the Challenge (DES, 1987) announced that two new funding bodies would be created which would be directly answerable to the Secretary of State and have powers to ‘contract’ with the institutions: that is, to allocate funding in return for the achievement of certain broad goals. The necessary legislation was enacted in 1988 as the Education Reform Act. By May 1991 the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council (PCFC) had begun to give effect to this policy, the Universities Funding Council (UFC) was still finding its way.

Two other manifestations of the Government’s wish to see universities becoming more efficient and economically responsive were the report of the Jarratt Committee on university management in 1985 (CVCP, 1985) and the first Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 1986. The former sought to remodel internal university governance and management along private sector corporation lines, with vice-chancellors becoming chief executives rather than academic leaders. The latter introduced the systematic external evaluation and ranking of all publicly funded university research, an exercise which was repeated in 1989, 1992, 1996 and 2001 and which is itself under scrutiny at the time of writing (HEFCE/SHEFC/HEFCW/DEL, 2003).

As well as the Department and the funding councils (and the research councils for some research), the other principal actors in determining policy were the bodies representing the heads of institutions, of which there were then three: CVCP, CDP and SCOP (representing the HE colleges). Of these, CVCP was by far the oldest, going back to 1918. CDP had been formed in 1970 as the last polytechnics were being designated under the 1968 Education Act. SCOP dated from 1978. These organizations were – and are – in effect trade associations, making representations and lobbying government about policies, disseminating advice and guidance to members, and delivering certain functions on their behalf, chiefly negotiating staff salaries under national bargaining arrangements with the relevant trade unions.

We now turn to a brief review of some of the relevant literature on the regulation of higher education.

The economic ideology of education

In an important series of writings, Tapper and Salter argue that since the war institutional autonomy has gradually reduced because of the view that successive governments have taken about the overriding importance of an efficient and dynamic economy. Moreover, this reduction was both inevitable and right, given higher education’s unique social role as the creator and legitimator of knowledge and status (and hence its accretion of socio-political power). The result has been ever more extensive and intrusive attempts to influence the behaviour of universities in the service of the Government’s goals for the economy (cf Watson and Bowden, 1999; Kogan and Hanney, 1999).

According to this thesis – which in general terms the author accepts – it was also inevitable that these attempts to control the universities should embrace the quality and standards of student learning, and that this should eventually involve – in the QAA – ‘a pliable instrument of ministerial will’ (Salter and Tapper, 2000: 84). By the same token, HEQC (‘chosen champion of the HEIs’), which attempted to represent the academic community and to protect self-regulation, was doomed: ‘as a political strategy to deal with an aggressive state it was unsustainable’ (ibid: 77). This is also the view of the only other study known to the author of the events described in this book (Perellon, 2001).

For reasons that will be explained in detail later, the author does not accept this judgement. While government interest in universities’ performance is unavoidable, it is not inevitable that the regulation of quality and standards should have developed as it has, nor will the present arrangements necessarily persist. The author’s long experience of policy making, in various public contexts, suggests that nothing is inevitable until it happens, and that there are almost always alternatives to be considered, and choices to be made, as in this case. Moreover the sector need not be supine but can influence the policies that are applied to it, if it has effective leadership (something which was, as we shall see, largely lacking in this case).

The evaluative state

An enormous literature has grown up around the notion of ‘the evaluative state’ (Neave, 1988; Henkel, 1991; Pollitt, 1993; Kettl, 1997; Neave, 1998). In a useful review Dill (1998) refers to the ‘essential principles’ of this approach as being:

• The separation of the government’s interests as the ‘owner’ or financial supporter of an agency from its interests as the purchaser of the services of that agency.
• Operational specification, in output terms, of the performance objectives of government agencies, i.e. performance measurement.
  
• Aligning accountability with control by delegating to agencies increased authority over inputs and decisions about resource use.
• Encouraging accountability for performance through reliance on explicit contracts, competition amongst service providers, and privaisation within government agencies.

(Dill, 1998: 361)

In the earlier article Neave argues that evaluation (of the performance of universities) has always been an intrinsic part of public policy making on higher education, and a legitimate one. However, the expansion of such evaluation, in particular through the establishment of powerful intermediary bodies such as the French Comité National d’Evaluation, HEQC, the Swedish Högskolverket, the Flemish Vlaamse Interuniversitaire Raad and for that matter the Dutch Vereeniging der Samenwerkende Nederlandse Universiteiten, represents a step change:

In essence . . . the Evaluative State reflects an attempt to go beyond historic modes of evaluation, to enforce more precise and more rapid responses from institutions of higher education by devising a highly elaborate and more widely ranging instrumentality of judgement than existed earlier. This instrumentality, if regularly applied, is dynamic and grounded upon a principle of contractualisation fundamentally different from the implicit ideas of contractualisation which bound State and university together in Europe for the best part of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
(Neave, 1998: 282)

In the later article, Neave draws attention to the way in which the state can change these agencies if they are not seen to be doing their job in helping with the overall steerage function. He gives the abolition of HEQC and the establishment of QAA as an example. As we shall see, the author considers this too simple an explanation for what actually happened in this particular case.

In an important article, Bleiklie (1998) challenges the views of both Tapper and Salter and Neave. While institutional autonomy is certainly a feature of some traditional views of the ‘normative space’ of university policy, it is not of all, and particularly not of the ‘rationalist’ perspective which emphasizes the role of universities in helping societies to meet their social and economic needs (and hence the need for societal control over them).

Just as there are different perspectives on the role and functions of universities which coexist, so there are different sets of expectations, which ‘are processes of gradual sedimentation rather than sequential stages’ (Bleiklie, 1998: 304). The main ones are:

• the university as part of the national civil service and as implementer of public policy;
• the university as an autonomous cultural institution;
• the university as a corporate enterprise, as a producer of educational and research services.

It is to the last of these that the emphasis has now shifted. So it is inevitable that the most important issue facing universities (and the state in its view of universities) is efficiency: ‘related to the rapidity and cost at which it produces useful services, research and candidates for the benefit of users, be they the university’s own faculty, administrators, employers of university graduates, or buyers of research’ (Bleiklie, 1998: 307). This requires both a strengthening in the administrative aspect of university governance and a shift in the position of the state:

From a traditional ex ante regulation in the shape of established rules, practices and budget decisions, the State has moved to emphasise ex post facto control. The focus lies on performance in relation to deliberately formulated policy goals. The central idea is that if state agencies are provided with clearly formulated goals and a set of incentives and sanctions invoked in response to actual behaviour, efficiency will thereby increase. When emphasis shifts from rule production and rule adherence to goal formulation and performance control, evaluation becomes a core activity and thus changes the way the State goes about its business of governance.
(Bleiklie, 1998: 307)

The regulatory state

A parallel literature has grown up around the ‘regulatory state’. Cope and Goodship (1999: 4) identify three sets of pressures that have contributed to this. At the ‘macro’ level, ‘states are restructuring themselves and the societies they govern so as to remain competitive in the global market place. This shift from a welfare state to a competition state constitutes a significant pressure upon governments to increasingly regulate public service provision so that spending is both directed towards achieving centrally set policy goals and contained within centrally set budgets’.

At the ‘meso’ level, New Public Management (NPM) aims to remove differences between the public and private sectors, and shi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1. Background and Context
• 2. Establishing the Framework
• 3. HEQC 1992–97
• 4. Assessment
• 5. The Creation of the Single System
• 6. The Quality Assurance Agency 1997–2002
• 7. UK Quality Assurance: Past, Present, Future
• Appendix 1: Definitions Used In the Book
• Appendix 2: Chronology of Attempts to Achieve an External Quality Assurance Regime
• Appendix 3: Information Requirements
• Appendix 4: Benchmark Statements
• References