left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

Photo by Life of Pix from Freerange Stock

It may be one of the lesser celebrated feast days of higher education (though not perhaps not as desoultry in the way that David Kernohan recently lamented that OfS Board Papers Publication Day has become), but last week’s publication by QAA of the first three chapters of its Advice and Guidance in support of the new UK Quality Code is still worthy of note.

This is because of both what they constitute, and how they were constituted.

collective wisdom

The Advice and Guidance is a truly collaborative endeavour.

Significant numbers of experienced and capable members of academic and professional services staff from across the sector (plus me as a hanger on – which is my way of declaring my interest as someone who was on the writing group for one of three chapters published last week).  All working together to provide a resource sharing effective practice across the sector; to help support the sector as a whole, to ensure the effective management of academic quality and standards.

The Advice and Guidance rightly has no regulatory standing itself in any of the UK’s four jurisdictions. Yet it’s greatly valued by many across the sector as a prompt for thought, reflection and action when universities are considering the effectiveness and further development of their approaches to managing academic quality and standards.

first steps

By this time next year we’ll have all 12 of the chapters of the Advice and Guidance, but for now we have just first three: Taking a strategic approach to managing quality and standards; Engaging students as partners; Operating partnerships with organisations.

As I said, the publication of these chapters may be one of the lesser celebrated of the sector’s red letter days, but it hasn’t been unmarked.  The launch webinar I attended last week for one of the chapters had c.300 attendees.  And we’ve also seen members of the Agency venture onto the pages of sector websites to write about the student voice and collaborative partnerships chapters.

Both of these address crucial sets of issues, but I’m tempted to claim (and I’m clearly biased, as this was the chapter I was on the writing group for) that the most important of the three chapters is perhaps the one on strategic approaches to managing quality and standards.

Why?

first things first

The new UK Quality Code published last year, and now the opening chapter in the Advice and Guidance, is, I think, the first time that the strategic dimension of managing quality and standards has been an explicit and distinct part of the Code and its predecessors.  In the past it has undoubtedly been implicit, and embedded; but not placed front and centre in the way that it is now.

The decision not to do this previously has always felt a little odd.

Few things are as strategically critical for a university as ensuring that it meets its responsibilities as an awarding body for ensuring the academic quality and standards of its provision.  And yet it often seems that meeting this responsibility is treated as a matter of routine, a compliance chore, rather than something that leaps to the front of minds when universities are asked to think about strategic priorities.

The Advice and Guidance on strategic approaches to managing quality and standards refers to how:

all quality instruments – including policy frameworks, activities, governance structures, and processes – are part of an integrated system that supports effective delivery of the provider’s strategic intent [p.4]

This isn’t one of the ‘reflective questions’ in this chapter of the Advice and Guidance, but I suspect all universities could usefully pause to consider how far and how effectively their own approach meets this test.

starting from first principles

I’m not suggesting that universities don’t meet their obligations on these matters; more that the strategic dimension is under-appreciated.

And I suspect that on those occasions where universities haven’t met their responsibilities for managing academic quality and standards (e.g. the recent instances of significant problems with some university’s collaborative provision), one of the causes may have been a collective corporate failure to appreciate the strategic criticality of managing academic quality and standards – both in its own right, and relative to the other strategic issues faced by those universities.

Thinking back to my last two blog posts on aspects of how OfS should take forward its development of a new integrated approach to quality assurance/assessment, this chapter of the Advice and Guidance also provides another useful pointer – if not in fact challenge. How will the new approach to the national regulation of academic quality and standards consider the strategic intent, drivers and effectiveness of institutional management of academic quality and standards?

So while the publication of this section of the Advice and Guidance may be one of the more niche feast days in the sector calendar, I think we should still regard it as a red letter day.