left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

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‘Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated’

Mark Twain, 1897

A cliche I know, but one that always comes to my mind when we’re tempted to think that in England at least the period of regular external quality assurance reviews of universitydegrees has ended.

Over the last year I’ve undertaken five quality reviews of English universities for PSRBs.  On top of that I’ve done one each of universities in Scotland and Wales, and two of providers in Northern Ireland.  Of course there are differences now to how such reviews operated in the past, most notably that all but two of these nine reviews have been conducted online or as a desk-based activity.  But nevertheless, the continuity of external quality review activity is clear.

And there is an aspect of this continuity that in my experience is always there, but through familiarity is rarely noted let alone remarked on: the presence of the programme specification.

the foundation

As with so much in modern UK higher education, the programme specification can be traced back to 1997’s Dearing Report with its Recommendation 21 (para. 9.53):

that institutions of higher education begin immediately to develop, for each programme they offer, a ‘programme specification’ which identifies potential stopping-off points and gives the intended outcomes of the programme

Accepted along with the Report’s other recommendations, programme specifications became a key, though not uncontroversial part, of the new national quality framework: a requirement for all programmes, first set out in specific guidance from QAA and later incorporated into the UK Quality Code under the rubric ‘definitive record of each programme and qualification’.  And while the explicit regulatory requirement for each programme to have a programme specification disappeared in England in 2018 with the revised UK Quality Code, they still (in my recent experience) remain ubiquitous in higher education.

the controversy

As I say, they have not been without their controversy.

I spent far too much of the first half of my career sitting through discussions about for whom programme specifications were being written.  Quality assurance documents to satisfy ‘Her Majesty’s QAA’ (as a former colleague used to refer to them)?  Programme design documents to support effective programme development and management?  Public information for prospective students, graduates and employers?  Discussions that at one and the same time were valid and necessary; and were arguing about quality assurance angels fighting for space on the head of the higher education pin.

And programme specifications were not without outright opposition from many academic colleagues.  Much of this was proforma and predictable, some of it less so or at least more interestingly expressed.  I always enjoyed the objection from a senior academic colleague who I knew well:

To present the educational richness of a degree programme in a programme specification, is like rendering the glorious biological complexity of the cow as an Oxo cube.

I didn’t agree, though I couldn’t help but appreciate the effort that went into this response.

the orthodoxy

I suspect that the reasons that I didn’t agree, and why programme specifications remain standard even despite the ending in 2018 of the specific external requirement for them, have quite a large overlap in the Venn diagram.  Despite the cynicism of some, I don’t think the reasons are because the sector is living in the past sticking with something past its sell-by-date purely out of habit.

Programme specifications, if used correctly, are a valuable tool and record of the programme design process.  Yes, the pedagogical approach of constructive alignment is limited if pushed too far.  But this underling approach in general is still of value, And in the specific, so are programme specifications setting out what students should achieve; how the programme’s learning and teaching strategy supports this; and how its assessment strategy demonstrates and assures this achievement.  In this post I want to focus on ‘what students should achieve’, by which I mean of course the programme learning outcomes.

heresy

The classic model for these learning outcomes has been a tripartite classification: what a student should know, understand or be able to do on successful completion of the programme.  And perhaps reflecting my own upbringing, and current status as a lapsed Anglican, I’ve always tended to think of this as the holy trinity of the degree programme: knowledge, understanding and skills.  All of crucial value, and of equal importance.

But the allusion to Anglicanism also sparks a dim recollection of when I had more than a passing interest in 17th century British religious history.  This was the period that saw the growth of more radical protestant thinking, leading over time to anti-trinitarianism; rejecting the traditional position that recognised the co-equal divinity of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit, and moving ultimately towards the unitarian belief that God was the single divine entity.

Which made me think about current debates about the nature and purpose of higher education. (As it does).

As the sector seeks to restore its social licence, as well as justify the costs to students and government, of undertaking a degree, the holy trinity of the outcome of a degree programme (the knowledge;, understanding and skills gained by a student) is being lost.

The rhetorical focus of much of the sector now focuses primarily and sometimes solely on the skills development gained through a degree, be that subject specific or more generic skills and qualities.  This was foreshadowed and reflected in the focus in higher level Apprenticeship Standards on knowledge-skills-behaviours not knowledge-understanding-skills.  And a coruscating blog by Ron Barnett for HEPI drew out the perils of the elimination of ‘understanding’ from the way we talked about degree programmes; and how this now appeared to moving on, to reduce the role of knowledge (after all, why do graduates need knowledge when AI knows everything?) so that the only one of the learning outcomes holy trinity that appeared to be left was skills.

true faith

This is not an argument that skills are not a crucial element of degree outcomes.  Instead it is a call for balance.  To recognise that the holy trinity of programme learning outcomes existed for a reason: knowledge, understanding and skills are all essential to a degree programme, and to privilege one of the three to the exclusion of the others actually undermines the worth of the one that is elevated.  Yes knowledge, understanding and skills are different in important ways; but they are crucially interdependent, and this is being lost in the current debate.

One way in which we can remedy this, perhaps, is to give a little more thought and prominence to that forgotten Dearing legacy: the programme specification, with its focus on knowledge, understanding and skills.  And ignore those who may say this is living in past, and realise that this is the much more productive and necessary process of living with the past and deriving benefit from this.