Examination of Witnesses (Questions 272
- 279)
MONDAY 9 MARCH 2009
PROFESSOR BOB
BURGESS, PROFESSOR
GINA WISKER,
PROFESSOR JAMES
WISDOM AND
PROFESSOR GEOFFREY
ALDERMAN
Q272 Chairman: Good afternoon, everyone,
and welcome to our panel of expert witnesses, and they are a very
impressive panel of expert witnesses, Professor Bob Burgess, the
Chair of HEAR Implementation Group and Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Leicester, and congratulations on your RAE assessment
and the settlement you got last week. No wonder you are smiling!
Professor Gina Wisker, the Chair of the Heads of Education and
Development Group, welcome to you. Professor James Wisdom, the
Vice-Chair of the Staff and Educational Development Association
(SEDA), welcome James, and last but by no means least Professor
Geoffrey Alderman, whom we have classed as "a commentator
on the quality of and management in higher education" and
I hope that perhaps gives you a generic feel to why you are here
and why we wanted to invite you. Can I just start with you, Professor
Burgess? We are very frustrated as a Committee about this inquiry
in that we hade a number of representatives of the major university
groups before us a few weeks ago and the impression was that there
was very little wrong with our higher education system, that teaching
was excellent, the research was excellent, that teaching and research
went together brilliantly, and yet the evidence we are getting
certainly from our e-consultation, the individual pieces of evidence
we are getting, is that there is a real issue about the quality
of teaching in higher education. You have been there a long time.
Has it improved over the last 30 years and what evidence have
you to say it has or it has not?
Professor Burgess: I think it
has certainly improved over the last 30 years and certainly part
of the evidence comes from the National Student Survey, the largest
independent survey conducted on behalf of Government, and indeed
there is a clear indication that the students are well-satisfied
with what they have received. Similarly, the NUS say that, but
of course you do not get 100 per cent of them satisfied, and I
think that is quite understandable. If you take two million students
and substitute them for 2 million washing machines, would you
not expect some of the washing machine owners to complain about
quality, about the standard, and indeed any other product? So
from that point of view, I think it is understandable that we
do not get 100 per cent of individuals who are satisfied, but
we do get over 80 per cent.
Q273 Chairman: Professor Burgess,
that was not the question I asked you, with due respect. As a
leading academic, I was asking you why over 30 years—of
course you can take a snapshot at any time and say that the teaching
is good, bad or indifferent, but is there any evidence at all
that over a period—and you use whatever period you like
and use any evidence—that the teaching is better, that the
quality which the students get now is better than it was 30 years
ago?
Professor Burgess: In order to
answer that you would have to have done longitudinal studies and,
sadly, the academic study of higher education is relatively recent,
barring one or two major exceptions, of people who have sustained
a career over 30 years focused on that. So in that sense I could
not say to you, if you compared the evidence in 1979 with 2009,
whether that is possible; indeed, even Government statistics do
not use the same categories, so it is very difficult to do the
kind of study you are saying. Anecdotally, and experientially,
I can say that I think the quality of teaching has improved, the
care which people give to students, the support students receive
and the fact that during that period we have moved from an elite
to a mass higher education system, but what I am not saying to
you is that nothing is wrong, everything is perfect, because in
any walk of life we would say that that was an inappropriate statement,
hence my analogy with manufacturing a particular product. You
would expect some owners to raise questions. Students have done
in the past and they do at this point in time. That is understandable.
Q274 Chairman: All right. Professor
Wisdom, you do not agree, do you?
Professor Wisdom: I do not. How
did you know?
Q275 Chairman: From your evidence,
which suggests that you take a contrary position?
Professor Wisdom: I do, yes.
Q276 Chairman: You feel that the
quality of teaching over years is not as good?
Professor Wisdom: No, I do not
think the quality of teaching—forgive me for suggesting
that your question is a very, very difficult one to answer, because
I think other things have been happening which changed the picture.
We have had one massive success. The massive success is that we
have expanded British higher education and maintained a level
of quality that is extremely satisfactory. That has been astonishing
and I think we need to recognise that. The thing that you are
experiencing and your difficulty—and some of the memoranda
of evidence show this—is that at the same time the processes
of education are going through a severe transition. They are changing
enormously and the models we were using 15 or 20 years ago are
no longer strong enough to carry the sort of education we need
today and it is the change in those processes which is giving
us difficulty. We have a modern system, we have an elite system,
and they are both together in the same system, and where they
rub together you can see fractures and difficulties. Some of the
things you are inquiring into like student satisfaction, plagiarism,
standards of degrees, are partly to do with the fact that we are
talking of old language to describe a new world.
Q277 Chairman: So when then, Professor
Wisker, is there this sort of semblance of self-satisfaction within
the system?
Professor Wisker: I do not think
there is a semblance -
Q278 Chairman: Are we misreading
that?
Professor Wisdom: Yes. I think
partly the problem is that we do not have, as Bob Burgess was
saying, specific evidence to prove that what is happening is totally
successful, so we do not like to say, "I can see this is
good," or, "It is bad." I do not think there is
self-satisfaction. My own view and the view of HEDG would be that
development for all people who are related to the learning of
students would help the quality of the students learning. So if
we turned it around and looked at where we might move in the future
as opposed to trying to come up with statistics and data that
we do not have about the current situation or the past, I think
we would be moving forward in the right direction.
Q279 Chairman: Professor Alderman,
if you went to our schools sector, or indeed to our further education
sector, indeed to any other sector of education and looked at
the quality of teaching the Government has put in place measures
to ensure that a certain standard is adhered to. Why is that not
possible within the higher education system? Why is this suddenly
so special that we should not demand world-class teaching standards?
Professor Alderman: It is because
there is a great fear in the higher education sector about an
Ofsted-style inspectorate being imposed by Government upon higher
education. This is regarded very widely within the sector as an
intrusion into the academic autonomy of institutions. By and large
they do not want an Ofsted-style inspectorate, which very reluctantly,
Chairman, I am coming round to, as one of the major planks of
the new strategy, which would underpin standards. Can I just say,
Chairman, students are the last people who are qualified to judge
academic standards. They would say that the quality of education
is good, would they not? They do not want to go out into the world
with a degree certification from an institution that had been
slagged off as being substandard. So I would not put too much
faith, Chairman, in the National Student Satisfaction Survey.
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