Quality Assurance in Higher Education. PROGRESS ACHIEVED AND ISSUES TO BE ADDRESSED
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09684889310046158 |
| Published date | 01 March 1993 |
| Date | 01 March 1993 |
| Pages | 15-20 |
| Author | George Gordon |
| Subject Matter | Education |
VOLUME
1
NUMBER 3
1993
Quality Assurance
in
Higher Education
PROGRESS ACHIEVED AND ISSUES TO
BE
ADDRESSED
George Gordon
The Government White Paper, Higher Education:
A New Framework, devoted a chapter to quality
assurance in teaching. A distinction was drawn
between the quality audit of the quality assurance
policies and procedures of institutions of higher
education and the quality assessment of education
provision in programmes of
study.
It was
acknowledged that the former task should rest
collectively, and individually, with institutions of
higher education, whilst the latter task was
allocated to the quality assessment committees of
the proposed unitary regional funding councils.
Higher education in Britain is now operating
within that framework for quality assurance,
control, audit and assessment. Assurance and
control are primarily the responsibility of
individual institutions. Checking that the policies
and procedures operate in practice, and that they
are guided by good practice, is the duty of the
Division of Quality Audit of the Higher
Education Quality Council (HEQC), the successor
for the unified system of higher education to the
Academic Audit Unit of the Committee of Vice-
Chancellors and Principals (CVCP). The funding
councils for England, Scotland and Wales have
established quality assessment committees and
divisions of quality assessment, and have
published their procedures for the process of
assessment, which differ significantly in detail,
and have conducted, or are commencing,
assessments.
WHAT PROMPTED THESE
DEVELOPMENTS?
Many elements and factors affect complex
political processes but, in this case, it does not
appear to be over-simplistic to highlight two
crucial areas of concern:
(1) Accountability in the use of public funds; and
(2) for the standards achieved in a burgeoning
and diversifying system of higher education.
In Britain, a succession of documents in the 1980s
marked a change in emphasis in relation to the
accountability of largely public-funded
institutions and organizations operating in social
markets. Increasingly, they were required both to
show evidence - e.g. performance indicators - of
the efficient, economical and effective
management of resources and to receive future
funding based on a presumed capability to make
further gains in efficiency. Those tempted to
associate such developments with a particular
political ideology disregard the facts that similar
trends occurred in other countries governed by
parties with a different political philosophy, and
that all of the major political parties in Britain
regularly state a commitment to accountability for
the use of public funds. It is difficult to escape the
conclusion that the argument is not "should it
occur?"
but, rather, "how should accountability
operate in order to serve the intended purposes of
reassurance and explanation?" These points will
be explored in greater detail with reference to
quality audit and quality assessment.
Perhaps the neglected factor to date has been
the question of standards, yet that has contributed
to the introduction of quality audit and quality
assessment. Arguments about standards are
commonplace within academe. Over the decades,
there have been countless debates within
institutions over a wide range of academic
matters, such as the introduction of new
disciplines, new degrees, new methods of
assessment, the required entry standards, and
regulations relating to the progress of students or
appeals by students. Nor are disagreements
Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 1 No. 3,1993, pp. 15-20
© MCB University Press, 0968-4883
15
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