Testing year ahead for law schools and their staff

Editorial from the Spring 2001 issue of Directions on the year ahead.

Many law teachers will have both their research and their teaching tested between now and the end of 2002. The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) entry list may have closed in December, but QAA stage 2 is already being lined up, the course is being inspected and the first contestants will be underway by this time next year.

Whilst it is too late to enhance individual performance in the RAE there is still time to choose which race departments will enter. It’s a game of percentages, where the stakes may be highest for the superior quality of some staff rather than the solid contributions of all or most. In many schools the sharp money is on entering only those staff who can be confidently expected to get a higher rating.

A department that might get 80% of its staff into the 3a category could be better off pitching for a 4 by entering only 75% of its staff. Near despair surrounds the plight of those staff who are discarded and not entered. The suggestion is that they will become ‘teaching only staff’. And where’s the disgrace in that? Injustice will occur if teaching expertise is ignored and promotion or sabbatical leave withheld for those whose priority in higher education is pedagogy.

Whilst the RAE has entered the page counting and word weighing stage, Law has been selected by the Quality Assurance Agency(QAA) as one of the subjects for review between 2001 and 2003. Many law departments or faculties have been proposed by their universities for inclusion in the first round that could begin in January 2002. This requires law schools to submit their self evaluation document to the QAA by the end of November this year.

If your law school will be one of these early entrants, QAA staff will already or very shortly be visiting your university to discuss the scope of the review. Whilst the process and the anxiety it induces may very soon be upon you, it is not an event to which staff should submit fatalistically or even abandon to the deliberations of the great and the good. There is plenty of time left to engage the process, as well as opportunities for crowing about your innovations and experiments.

The first task is to ensure that reviewers are informed, up to date and representative of the diversity of law schools. ‘Good practice’ is bandied around as if we encounter it everyday and know what it looks like when we bump into it. The reality may be that much enthusiastic and effective teaching is largely unappreciated, ignored or forgotten.

• who is it in your school, faculty or department that you, your colleagues or students appreciate and value for their teaching efforts?
• whose paperwork and materials are especially interesting and well presented?
• which modules use different media or make significant use of role plays?
• when does peer and self assessment occur?
• who has been singled out as exemplary by external examiners?

Colleagues betraying such tendencies need naming and praising. And those who are confident enough to recognise that they have experience and expertise to contribute elsewhere should ask their head of school to put their name forward to QAA as a reviewer. Your discipline needs you.

The quality and diversity of our reviewers is also important to ensure that the efforts of those schools whose admissions policy cannot be resolved by a straight three A levels at AAB are appropriately acknowledged. Student progress is now one of three evaluation criteria. Peter Milton, the QAA Director of Programme Review, has acknowledged that the complexity of identifying benchmark standards for the diversity of students now entering higher education defies any attempt to calculate ‘value added’.

The fear of some law schools who admit significant numbers of disadvantaged entrants is that they will struggle to convince reviewers that in spite of a lower proportion of upper seconds at graduation, they are nevertheless achieving much with their students. According to Peter Milton it will be for the reviewers to ensure that recognition is paid where it is due.

Schools facing this predicament should do their best to illustrate and emphasise the progress of such students. We can all assist by recognising that a third class honours degree is a major achievement for many. And that law degrees provide a career pathway for far more students who are not going to make fortunes in the City, than for those who will.

Whilst the process will undoubtedly be seen by some as divisive and demoralising, the culture of accountability and evaluation is now permanent. As a participant from Kent in the recent UKCLE seminar on QAA pointed out, we can spend time by railing at the system or seize the opportunity to make sure it works more in our favour.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010