Examination of Witnesses (Questions 67
- 79)
WEDNESDAY 28 JANUARY 2009
PROFESSOR DAVID
BAKER, MS
PAT BACON,
AND PROFESSOR
JOHN CRAVEN
Q67 Chairman: Can I welcome our second
panel before us today and indeed thank you all, Professor David
Baker, the Chair of the Higher Education representative body GuildHE,
Pat Bacon, representing the 157 Group and Professor John Craven,
representing the University Alliance. Thank you very much indeed
for coming this morning and for sitting through the earlier session.
I am sure that you enjoyed some of those exchanges! I wonder if
I could start with you, Professor Craven, and ask you this question.
Times Higher Education did publish a survey and Loughborough
came out top. What do you feel matters most to students when they
attend a college or university?
Professor Craven: I think that
one should also take into account the National Student Survey,
which of course is a much bigger sample than the Times Higher
survey was, but I think that the same question is valid. My view
is that students choose universities—and from our research
certainly in my institution—first because they think the
course is the right course for them; second, because they like
the location; when they come and see it, they feel at home in
the institution; third, because they expect that with their pre-qualifications—and
I would want to say in response to some of the things said in
the last session that not every student by any means comes in
with A-levels, we take in students with all sorts of qualifications—but
they will want to know that they are going to get the support
that they will want, given their background and perhaps given
their likely grades or whatever it is. They take those three things
into account, therefore. Our experience of student satisfaction
is that if they feel they have got that right—in other words,
that the course does deliver what they were expecting and the
place is a nice place to be—then they will be satisfied.
They do have expectations when they come, therefore, and we normally
seem to fulfil them. The National Student Survey does say that
a great many students are satisfied. I would therefore say that
that is what drives student satisfaction.
Q68 Chairman: Pat, your organisation
represents a significant number of high-quality further education
colleges. We heard in the previous session that significant numbers
of students, particularly to the Million+ universities, are coming
directly from further education; but are you concerned that the
prospectus does not include clear information about the number
of hours taught, who will actually be doing the teaching—those
other facilities which you would get with any other product that
you were purchasing anywhere else in the system? Does that concern
you or not?
Ms Bacon: I think that it is an
issue and, in the end, it is also an issue that students themselves
need to be asked, because clearly they are the ones who are using
the information to make the decision. It is the case that within
the 157 Group quite a number of us are directly funded by the
Higher Education Funding Council and therefore are delivering
a range of higher education provision. Our contact with students
will be very personal. We often know them. If we do not know them,
we will certainly interview them. We will give them the opportunity
to come and see exactly what they are going to get. I sense that
there is a growing issue about how much teaching, the quality
of teaching and so on, throughout the higher education world.
I therefore had a great deal of interest in the line of questioning
you were pursuing.
Q69 Chairman: Professor Baker, do
you share that concern that we are not transparent about what
is the actual offer we are giving to students, in terms of the
product which is going to be delivered in a particular institution?
Does that concern you?
Professor Baker: I think that
there are some concerns. One of the points that GuildHE has made
in its submission is about information, advice and guidance at
schools. You have mentioned the prospectus. The prospectus is
only one element of the information that is given—the hard-copy
prospectus. There is very much the website, for example. There
are very much open days, and other information that is given both
in printed form or other media, and also face to face. Institutions
that are in the membership of GuildHE have very close relationships
with schools and colleges, the FE sector or the secondary sector.
We very much have the kind of relationship that encourages people
onto campus much earlier than the 17 and 18.
Q70 Chairman: I understand what you
are saying but I do not know how you advise students. When you
compare two particular universities with the same course, you
do not know how many hours are taught on each; you do not know
who will be actually teaching it; you do not know how much work
students will have to do; you often do not know about assessment
procedures; you do not know that, because it is a high-quality
research university, you will actually get a leading academic
rather than a post-doc or indeed a postgraduate student teaching
you. How on earth can you get careers departments in schools to
give that sort of advice to students when there is no evidence
there?
Professor Baker: I think that
there are good links between universities of all kinds and careers
departments. One thing that was not mentioned in the earlier discussion
which I would want to bring to the fore is SPA—Supporting
Professionalism in Admissions—where there are very extensive
guidelines that are widely followed in the sector, across all
admission groups, with regard to good practice in admissions,
and it relates inter alia to things like the transparency
of the process. I would also go back to the point about the prospectus
as one element of the information given. Before students come
to institutions to study, and as they are there, in the vast majority
of cases there is significant information given about a description
of what they will be taught, by whom, for how many hours; programme
descriptors, module descriptors, and so on.
Q71 Chairman: Can I come back to
you briefly, Pat, before handing over to my colleague Gordon Marsden?
Those of us who worked in mainstream education—I was a head
for 20 years before I came into the House and I have a good knowledge
of FE—know that if I wanted to employ staff in my school
or you, as a college principal, wanted to employ staff in FE,
unless they had the appropriate qualifications to teach they cannot
do it. Yet the universities can have people who are totally untrained
as far as teaching students, who are then paid for that privilege.
Is that right?
Ms Bacon: I think that teachers
should be professionally qualified, and I am a professionally
qualified teacher myself.
Q72 Chairman: Does that apply in
higher education? Should it apply?
Ms Bacon: Certainly the teachers
who work for me who are delivering higher education—and
I am sure that is the case throughout FE where it is delivering
HE[6]—will
be professionally qualified teachers. In further education we
have a very strong culture around pedagogy. We have a very strong
culture around quality of teaching and learning. I think that
goes back over many years. We may well come back to the QAA, but
if you look at recent QAA reviews, while they were still very
much focusing on teaching and learning, generally reviews of HE
in FE (i.e. delivered by the FE) have come out very well indeed.
Because the two things we do really well are that we teach well
and deliver learning well, and we support students very well;
so I think there is a great deal of focus on that.
Q73 Dr Gibson: People in higher education,
universities, are recruited because of their research; the number
of papers they have; how they are going to figure in the RAE.
"Yes, you can do a bit of teaching but don't take it too
seriously. The real way of judging a university is by research."
I can hear vice-chancellors saying that.
Ms Bacon: I am slightly uncomfortable
about that. What I would say about further education is that we
do not always necessarily take people in who are qualified on
day one. It is incredibly important that we have people who come
out of industry. Many of my staff are still practising in terms
of whatever is their particular expertise; but we train them and
they become qualified teachers. I know that is enshrined in law
now, but it was something we had as a policy before that.
Professor Craven: It is a bit
of a caricature of universities that I do not recognise and I
do not think applies across the institutions that I represent.
In my university we require anybody who comes into teaching who
has not previously had such training at least to take a certificate.
Many of them go on to further pedagogical research. We do require
people to be trained in teaching. As has just been said, they
do not come in with it, because there is not a methodology perhaps
for doing it before we recruit them; but within the early time
with us they are required to do that. I would strongly reject
the idea that we do not take seriously the training of people
to teach.
Q74 Dr Gibson: Do they do serious
research as well?
Professor Craven: Of course they
do, yes.
Q75 Dr Gibson: They publish in high-flying
journals?
Professor Craven: Yes. If you
look in the Research Assessment Exercise you will see that Alliance
universities have a lot of high-quality research.
Q76 Chairman: With respect, you do
not know that, do you?
Professor Craven: Do not know
what?
Q77 Chairman: You do not know whether
all university lecturers are qualified to teach?
Professor Craven: I would know
that about my institution and I would guess that other vice-chancellors
would say the same. I am not sure what it is you think I do not
know.
Q78 Dr Gibson: David could answer
this. We were colleagues once.
Professor Baker: Indeed. I have
to agree with Professor Craven that I think your description of
the academic who does research and a bit of teaching if they have
to is an old-fashioned and out-of-date one. That is not the case
across the sector. Speaking particularly for GuildHE institutions,
as with Alliance members and as with Professor Craven's institution,
we require colleagues who are appointed to undergo training and
some kind of certification process. We also strongly encourage,
if not require, membership of the Higher Education Academy. There
is therefore a very strong emphasis on being prepared for and
qualified to teach. It is not quite the same as being a schoolteacher,
but there is a very strong emphasis on that. Bear in mind, of
course, that in institutions like mine you are dealing with professional
and vocational subjects in many respects. Those people who have
come in probably already have some kind of appropriate qualification
anyway. In terms of research, we are not going to perform very
strongly in the Research Assessment Exercise, though we did do
so in terms of small pockets of excellence in our institutions;
but, again, we do require scholarly and research activity to be
undertaken in our institutions as part of underpinning teaching
at university-level education.
Q79 Mr Marsden: Pat, I wonder if
I could come back to you. You heard in the previous session the
discussion about the relationship between FE, FE networks and
higher education; but, from the point of view of a student doing
HE in FE, is that student getting a fair crack of the whip compared
to someone doing HE in HE? I do not ask that from the standpoint
necessarily of is the FE college itself not providing as good
facilities; I ask it more from the standpoint of when that student
leaves or wants to transfer perhaps, as university courses become
more portable, are they disadvantaged compared to people who do
an HE course in a traditional HE institution?
Ms Bacon: I think that there are
a number of issues in that question. If I take the example of
the foundation degree, for example—and we deliver, as do
many 157 and Association of Colleges members—this was very
much designed with an articulated progression route. That was
the concept behind it. We have certainly found very good progression
from the foundation degree. I know that it is a qualification
in its own right and that often gets overlooked, but none the
less there is a good take-up of people going on. We have had ex-students
of ours who did the foundation degree coming out of the university
of their choice, in some case with First-Class Honours; so there
is some real evidence. I do not think that they are disadvantaged
in that sense, therefore. I was inevitably thinking also about
the resources issue. The student survey reflected very positively
on students following HE in FE. Where we think the relationship
works best with our universities—and I am thinking here
of the validating universities that we use for our provision—it
is where there really is an academic community. In the end, therefore,
it is not just about going through a process of validation; it
is also about joint professional development and about staff working
together. Where the relationships are good, I think that there
are some real positives. In the end, it is the student who benefits
because they can be confident of a local experience, which is
often what attracts them sometimes in a familiar environment,
but with the knowledge that they can access university resources;
that they can be confident about the quality and level of the
experience; and, with the progression, generally the experience
has been good so far.
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