A more hit than miss report?

In this editorial from the Autumn 2009 issue of Directions Julian Webb, UKCLE Director, examines the recent report on higher education in England, asking whether its recommendations can be made to work and whether it asked the right questions in the first place.

Note. the views expressed in this editorial are personal. The Higher Education Academy is preparing a formal response to the report.

Students and universities, the long awaited report by the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, was finally published on 2 August. Running to 166 pages it is a substantial document that pulls very few punches, but also manages some significant misses in its analysis of the current state of higher education in England.

The report contains a lengthy raft of recommendations. Those most widely commented upon focus on the related issues of standards, quality assurance, and widening participation, though the scope of the report as a whole goes beyond those topics.

Widening participation

The report makes a large number of recommendations as regards access and widening participation, including:

• the use of “contextual factors” in admissions should be promoted and monitored (paras 47-48)
• a national code of practice on admissions should be agreed (para 51)
• the nature and extent to which higher education institutions are “incentivised to investigate and carry out outreach initiatives” should be examined urgently (para 73)
• higher education provision in further education colleges should be expanded (para 83)
• a national bursary scheme should be considered as part of the forthcoming review of student fees (para 137)
• all aspects of support for part time and mature students should be reviewed with a view to substantially reducing the differences in treatment between full and part time students (para 152)

A number of these are consistent with the recent conclusions of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions (see news item), and, relative to some of the other recommendations of the committee, most are fairly uncontroversial. The report does touch on the question of funding for additional numbers, but otherwise does little to address the resourcing issues that are raised by continuing expansion of higher education.

Quality and standards

The committee argues that the “the sector needs to address the question of standards now” (para 307). It asserts that “as long as there is a classification system it is essential that it should categorise all degrees against a consistent set of standards across all higher education institutions” (para 256), and recognises the need to adopt more consistent responses to the problem of plagiarism (para 279). It also recommends that the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) should be reformed into a new Quality and Standards Agency with greater powers “to safeguard the integrity of standards” (para 307), and with responsibility to review and report on the quality of teaching as such (para 226). The committee also argues that the Higher Education Academy should have “a key role in promoting and enhancing academic standards” (para 308).

A number of these are, individually and in principle, not unreasonable recommendations, and in some respects they are not new. The Burgess Group final report (Beyond the honours degree classification, 2007), for example, had already called on the higher education sector to consider how greater consistency and clarity could be brought to assessment practices. Similarly, the committee’s calls for the establishment of a national pool of recognised external examiners (at para 273), and for the training and qualification of teachers in higher education (paras 186-7), were first made by the Dearing Committee as long ago as 1997.

However, there are two questions we should be asking – first, whether the committee, which in other contexts has placed considerable emphasis on evidence-based policy making, has overstepped the evidential mark in making its recommendations, and, secondly, whether these recommendations are collectively sensible and viable. We shall return to the second shortly; the first deserves some consideration here.

The committee drew on a range of existing evidence and much opinion that was presented by witnesses and written memoranda. It rightly notes the paucity of good quality research and recommends further work to explore a number of pressing questions – including the extent of so-called grade inflation and apparent variations in student workload and study time. It actually adds very little that is new to the evidence base, particularly as regards the student experience, which was intended to be its primary focus. It is thus perhaps a matter of legitimate concern that it proceeds to make such wide ranging recommendations in the absence of stronger evidence.

Looking forward

The critical question will be, if such changes are to be implemented, how should it be done? The devil, as always, will lie in the detail. There is a real need for care in this process. While many of the individual recommendations make sense, there is a risk that they may constitute collective overkill.

The tendency in the report to view centralisation uncritically as a ‘good thing’ needs to be treated with some scepticism. Despite its apparent faith in external regulation, an overly bureaucratic, ‘command and control’ regulatory response is not only going to be expensive (note both the history of QAA subject review and the extent to which the Ofsted review process has been slimmed down since 2005), it may well not achieve the results the committee wants. There needs to be a fair degree of sectoral buy-in to the changes proposed.

The report itself explores relatively few alternatives. For example, it could be argued that many of the concerns raised could be addressed by the introduction of measures to increase transparency and reduce the information asymmetry that exists between institutions and potential students, without such extensive redesign of the quality assurance system. Similarly, it might be argued that current funding arrangements in fact demonstrate the need for a more sophisticated balancing of controls and incentives, rather than the greater emphasis on regulatory ‘sticks’ and disincentives that the report appears to suggest. However, there are also signs in the report that its authors recognise that a market approach, in which the state has little or no role in defining minimum educational entitlements, risks throwing various babies out with the bathwater – education is a social good, and there is a legitimate public interest in educational values, teaching quality and student progression. A careful balance does need to be struck between desirable institutional autonomy, which supports diversity and creativity, and recognises the freedom of institutions to create a distinctive mission within the higher education marketplace, and the interests of the state and consumers in the quality of higher education. In this context, the committee’s recommendation of a concordat between HEFCE, the universities and student bodies defining the scope of institutional autonomy could well provide some ‘constitutional’ protection and delimitation of that ideal.

As noted above, it is important that any policy change is evidence-based. The committee’s recognition of various gaps in research and of the importance of pedagogic research (para 176) is also to be welcomed (though the encouragement of such research in discipline-based research assessment has been the stated practice in the Research Assessment Exercise for a number of disciplines, including law, for at least the last two assessments). At the same time, however, there is, perhaps, some unwillingness in the report to address the complexity of the higher education sector and to over-simplify problems and solutions. Its focus is very much on the experience of the domestic undergraduate student. The committee deliberately excluded postgraduate study, which makes up a significant proportion of most universities’ work, and it also does little to examine the English system in the context of global trends in higher education. While there is some discussion of the US system, there is virtually nothing of substance about Europe and the Bologna process, nor about developments in Asia and Australasia. In this regard its outlook is extraordinarily insular. Finally, there is also relatively little attempt in the report to understand or explore the causes of the current difficulties that the higher education sector faces. The extent to which the system is still negotiating the transition from elite to mass provision of higher education may be seen as a prime example. It could be argued that a weakness of the recent debate about declining standards has been the marked reluctance seriously to consider the question whether the nature and value of a first degree can be the same in a mass as it is in an elite system.

In short, the report needs and deserves to be taken seriously, but before moving forward we need to consider not only whether the committee’s recommendations as a package can be made to work in policy terms, but also whether it asked the right questions in the first place.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010