left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

In a piece published on WonkHE two weeks’ ago I argued that the renewed conflicts over quality assurance/assessment in English higher education had yielded some benefits, but at too great a cost.  And that as OfS starts to revise (yet again) the English approach one of the key foundations needed to be a shift back to the co-regulatory, collaborative approach between the sector and its regulator that was effectively jettisoned in 2016 and/or 2018.

Before, during and after the writing of that piece, one word has repeatedly drawn my attention.  And the mere mention of it probably condemns me as old-fashioned.  The word is process.

And this word has drawn my attention, at least initially, in non-higher education contexts.

sport

I have become a little obsessed with the three seasons of the Amazon Prime programme The Test (£), a ‘fly on the wall’ documentary tracking the Australian test cricket team between 2018 and 2023.  It’s typical of the genre, manipulative of its audience and periodically insightful at the same time.

One of the things that comes through again and again is ‘process’.  The frequent (at times incessant) references to players establishing, implementing and reflecting on how they approach the game; and the injunction to ‘trust the process’ and the outcomes will follow. The ‘process’ is critical.

music

The same word struck me in a programme I recently listened to about the making of Talk Talk’s masterpiece Spirit of Eden.  Not that it was regarded as a masterpiece when it was released in 1988.  At the time many dismissed it as a formless, rambling mess.  It’s only with time that it has come to be recognised.

So being a man of a certain age, as soon as I came across Guy Garvey’s BBC programme about this album a few months ago I immediately downloaded it and was immediately fascinated.  What struck me, though, was the emphasis on ‘the process’ (from 13:01) during the recordings.  The outcome of Spirit of Eden feels antithetical to the notion of ‘process’.  But the ‘process’ was key.

thought

And the word hit me straight between the eyes when reading a recent blog by Peter Bryant of the University of Sydney on Thrilling in third spaces: Complexity, AI and the abundant between.  Bryant refers to the work of Jack Eller including the way it draws on Heraclitus, and quotes the following.

Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but a continuing flow; the sun is not a thing, but an enduring fire. Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change. Not stable things, but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world.

All of which is interesting (at least to me), but what on earth does this have to do with quality assurance/assessment in higher education?

where we are

It comes back to something I’ve written about before: the way in which from 2018 OfS explicitly moved to an outcomes-based approach to quality assessment, and decried previous approaches that focused too much on ‘systems and process’.

This was always both important and necessary; and misleading.

Important and necessary: previous approaches to quality assurance had focused far too little on outcomes and outputs of the education side of higher education.

Misleading: as outcomes are the result of processes.  Outcomes come from a wide range of interacting educational processes (as of course as being influenced in important ways by factors that sit outside these processes and universities delivering educational opportunities).

The underlying theory of the OfS approach was that the process was a matter for providers; developed, implemented and overseen by internal governance to achieve good student outcomes.  And OfS would concern itself with the outcomes.

why we’re lost

There are, at least, two issues with this.

One is the way that universities have responded.  I argued a while back that in its approach to quality assurance/assessment OfS was giving English universities:

an opportunity through its focus on principles and outcomes not process.  The opportunity isn’t to abandon process.  It’s to choose to remake our processes in ways that deliver real educational value.

Unfortunately there has been a tendency in too many universities, to too large a degree, to regard the OfS academic quality and standards regime as the first of these options rather than the second.  This is very likely one of the important causes of the recent revelations relating to some franchised provision, and anecdotally has had wider consequences for the way in which academic quality and standards is managed in some universities.

The second issue is that the outcomes data that OfS is using is too lagged, too general and too limited to be sufficiently reliable as the primary means of assuring academic quality and standards in the sector.  And while it’s tempting to think that this is ‘just’ a question of ‘getting the data’ right, if OfS and the sector were to go down I can’t help but be reminded of this warning:

An emperor wishes to have a perfectly accurate map of the empire made.  The project leads the country to ruin – the entire population devotes all its energy to cartography.

J-F Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984), p.55

Given these shortcomings in the outcomes data available to a national regulator, institutional processes for managing academic quality and standards are an essential, crucial element of a whole system approach to ensuring strong student outcomes and educational value.  And if they are essential, a national regulator has to show some concern for process as well as a concern for outcomes.

where we were

This isn’t an argument that we should simply return to a pre-2018 golden age where process was all.

It would be a caricature to say that by the mid 2010s quality assurance in English universities looked like a well-manicured lawn.  From a distance, and often up close, looking fine; but also a bland, even sterile monoculture that reduced ecological variation and resilience.

But all caricatures have some basis in reality.

The similarities across universities in the way that they assured educational quality prior to 2018 amounted to homogenisation, with approaches and processes that did vary between universities in their detail but materially were fairly standard.

where we should go

Rather than a return to the past, I’m suggesting that the way forward for quality assurance/assessment in England is an approach that genuinely focuses on both outcomes and process.

OfS, working in partnership with the sector, needs to adopt an approach that absolutely places student outcomes at its heart; but which also recognises the key role of institutional processes.  Alongside outcomes, the national regulatory approach must consider the current and likely future robustness institutional processes to ensure these outcomes and the delivery of educational value for students.

And the path forward may not be that difficult to discern.

Continuing to set the regulatory framework, as the current B conditions do, in terms of student outcomes, rather than the more process-focused approach of the 2010s.

Being clear that OfS will continue to not define what process(es) universities adopt to ensure strong outcomes and the delivery of educational value; the space to develop tailored, innovative approaches will remain.  But OfS being equally clear that whatever the process(es) adopted, this needs to be strong and effective; that assurance of this cannot be provided solely by institutions themselves; and that this will be supplemented by periodic confirmation (or not) by expert external review teams.

Ensuring that the returning cyclical review by external peers, which is now in the offing, scrutinises both process and outcomes.  Review teams will use their expertise, experience and judgment to form a holistic view of both the educational value being delivered for students, and whether institutional processes to ensuring this value are, and are likely to continue to be, aligned with the delivery of strong outcomes.

All at the same time as continuing to monitor student outcomes across the sector independently of this, holding universities to the importance of delivering for students and providing a mechanism for more direct, OfS intervention outside the cyclical review cycle where there is evidence that this is needed.

and not or

Too often issues and challenges are presented in simplistic, dualistic terms; ‘this or that’.  Most often, they are much better seen and addressed in terms of ‘this and that’. And how we move forward on English higher education’s approach to quality assurance/assessment is one of the latter.

Since the start of this phase of the Quality Wars there has been too much focus on outcomes or process as the way ahead in quality assurance/assessment in England. There needs to be a return to process, approaches differently than in the past, alongside this.  And if arguing for this makes me old-fashioned, so be it.