Students and Universities - Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 360 - 379)

MONDAY 9 MARCH 2009

PROFESSOR PAUL RAMSDEN, MR PETER WILLIAMS AND MR ANTHONY MCCLARAN

  Q360  Dr Harris: Mr Williams, we are a science committee, partly, as well as innovation, universities and skills. Do you share the feelings we might have about science degrees being awarded for homeopathy, for example, or would you accept it for astrology next?

  Mr Williams: This is one of the questions about standards, is it not? I have said somewhere else that we do not want the standards of yesterday, we want the standards that are relevant today and I think that communities are going to have to decide whether homeopathy is an appropriate subject to be studied in higher education. I do not myself think it is QAA's role to determine which subjects are or are not appropriate.

  Q361  Dr Harris: What about higher education, because clearly you could look at the history of it, for example, and theology is studied and there is a lot of scientific matter there, and I am asking whether a BSc should involve reference to the scientific method and experiment, at least as a core principle and not the rejection of that as the core of the subject?

  Mr Williams: I think it is for the higher education and scientific community itself to determine the process it is prepared to accept as being genuine for its own purposes. If that scientific community collectively says that a particular subject area like, as you rightly say, astrology, is not appropriate, then it should not support it.

  Q362  Dr Harris: But if the university is desperate to get students in—we have just discussed this, Parliament has never voted for this but there is a market in higher education—and they just want to attract students and they find it easier and cheaper, i.e. more profitable, to attract students to a BSc in alternative medicine rather than experimental chemistry, then they will do it and the fact that there is some professor of the Royal Society huffing and puffing is not going to stop them. Are you going to stop them?

  Mr Williams: This is not something for QAA. This is not QAA business. QAA does not exist to regulate the scientific method and its application. That is something for the academic community to do and I think if the academic community says that we should not have degrees in homeopathy—which presumably are legal, because homeopathy is legal, astronomy is legal, so it is not breaking any law -

  Dr Harris: It is not the degree, it is the BSc. I thought the Quality Assurance system would say that a BSc leads someone through the process with an understanding of science and scientific methods. So we can have Bachelors of Art and we have theology degrees, but science is science. Surely there must be some way for you to interact with this question, otherwise it is meaningless?

  Q363  Chairman: We are back to square one really, are we not, Peter, to the point where we started on this whole argument of what is this role, that if institutions can in fact do all this process themselves, what is your point? If you cannot intervene on such a fundamental issue, where can you intervene?

  Mr Williams: What we can do, and our reviewers would do, would be to go and look at a programme in something like homeopathy, how that had been approved, why that had been approved and what the scientific rationale behind it had been. We cannot stop the universities offering degrees in subjects they want to offer. They are unfettered in what they can offer.

  Q364  Dr Harris: They could call it a doctorate even if it is a three year Bachelor degree -

  Mr Williams: No, because that falls foul of the framework. The framework requires a certain level of engagement over time.

  Q365  Dr Harris: But you would expect the external examiner to pick this up -

  Mr Williams: If I were the reviewer, if I were an auditor on this one, I would want to see the external examiner's report. I would want to see what the external examiner is saying about this and how the university had responded to it, but there is a limit to the powers which an organisation like ours, without legal powers to close things down, can exercise in these areas.

  Q366  Chairman: But should you have them?

  Mr Williams: Well, it would be an extremely powerful power, to close things down. Take higher education, or take our powers. It is well outside what has been allowed to us. I would be very wary about giving the power to close things down.

  Q367  Dr Harris: Are you a mature enough organisation to handle that power, or do you think it is too much power for an organisation like yours?

  Mr Williams: No, what of course we could do—it would be a nuclear option and so the danger is that we would not actually do it very often, we would not exercise the power.

  Q368  Dr Harris: You are not doing anything very often at the moment, it is established?

  Mr Williams: No, not at all. I think that is a very unfair analysis.

  Q369  Dr Harris: You have done a couple of things in FE[2] that were powerful but nothing in HE?

  Mr Williams: No, no, no. A lot of our power is the power of influence and fear. I think when I was here last time I pointed out some of the consequences of the work we have done. It is universities losing their credit rating, which is very serious for them, vice-chancellors resigning. These are things which we have to be very careful about. We are not in the business of destroying universities or higher education activities. It is not our objective to destroy them

  Chairman: I am sorry, Dr Harris, I have got to stop you there. This is really exciting stuff and this is just the worst afternoon we have to be short of time, but I am very anxious to hear from Professor Ramsden before he leaves, so five minutes on each of these last two questions and I am going to reverse them, six and five.

  Q370  Mr Marsden: I will not get into whether every Bachelor of Science is a good scientist any more than a Bachelor of Arts is a good artist. Professor Ramsden, if I can come to you, your Academy was set up in 2004 and you have joined it as its first Chief Executive. Not least if you were here for the earlier session and heard some of the discussions about the balance between research and teaching, does it not seem sometimes as if you are David throwing a few sling shots at Goliath?

  Professor Ramsden: It could sometimes seem like that, but my view is that there is no natural divide between teaching and research and education. I think we heard Professor Alderman say earlier on that it was an ideal that there should be a link between the two things. I think it is an ideal and it is an ideal I very much respect. One of the things we have tried to do is to encourage the links between teaching and research. I am sure that good teaching is informed by research and that students have the experience of being taught by people who are scholarly or inspirational, who are keen, and I think that is very, very important in higher education. To continue to answer your question, I think it would be inappropriate to set up a natural divide between the research and the teaching function. Most people go into academia, I certainly did because I was interested in finding things out, on the one hand, and interested in sharing them with other people as well, and I think that is a very important part of the quality of the student experience to have that.

  Q371  Mr Marsden: Again, as I said to an earlier witness, that is a very nice, slightly Utopian view, but what do you do at the hard edges? What do you do, assuming you agree with what Professor Alderman said earlier about the brilliant researcher who is a hopeless teacher? Do you just say that does not matter, or do you try and put him or her under more pressure to become a better teacher, or what?

  Professor Ramsden: In my view, it matters very much because that researcher will probably agree with what I said, that he went into academia not just to do research but also to share his knowledge, his experience and his inspiration with other people. I believe that is a very important part of what all academics should do. It is obviously up to universities to encourage that. My view is—and it is anecdotal evidence—that they do encourage it, but we encourage it from the Higher Education Academy's point of view by working with the higher education sector to develop a national professional standards framework for teaching which all academics are expected—and it is self-regulating—to rise up to.

  Q372  Mr Marsden: So we have now got a bit of what you are doing, which is—how can I put it kindly?—focussed on recidivists, useless researchers who really ought to be good at teaching?

  Professor Ramsden: No, I do not think a deficit model of teaching is really a very effective one. I am very concerned to ensure that most people in academia want to be good at teaching, they want to teach students and to encourage them and enable them to do that through the kinds of programmes we accredit and the support and the workshops that we provide through our subject centres..

  Q373  Mr Marsden: Can I just move on and ask you, as I say, you are in your fifth year now and according to HEFCE, these latest accounts, you have got £21.9 million from them for 2007/2008. If I was a nasty person at the National Audit Office and I was doing an audit of you, how would you actually say the £24 million (or thereabouts) you received from the taxpayer is actually making a difference? Can we see a quantitative difference over the five years of your existence, between the quality of teaching and raising the status of it from what it was beforehand?

  Professor Ramsden: That is a very good question because it is very difficult to make that connection, because what we can do with our £21 million is relatively small compared with what universities can do with their much larger pots of resources. I think there has been an improvement in that standard of teaching in higher education over the last five to ten years, or the thirty years the Chairman was talking about. The extent to which the Academy can say it has achieved that and encouraged that, I think is a difficult question to answer.

  Q374  Mr Marsden: Do you see yourself as the grit in the oyster, and if you are the grit in the oyster who are the people who are producing the pearls?

  Professor Ramsden: I think what we have done is to operate to produce an accreditation framework, and we accredit now over 200 programmes in higher education and continuing professional development things for universities, and that has undoubtedly had an effect on enhancing the standard of teaching in universities. The evidence is there in the students' views, in what people say, in the Quality Assurance Agency's reports.

  Q375  Mr Marsden: Just coming to the end on this, you talk in your submission statements about bringing out the best learning experience and environment for students but I am right, am I not, in thinking that on a regular basis you do not actually engage directly with students? You take evidence and surveys, and all the rest of it. Is that a big weakness in what you are trying to do, or do you have plans to have a more regular engagement with students, or what?

  Professor Ramsden: The short answer is, yes, we work at multiple levels, we work with higher education institutions, with universities and colleges, with individual academics and at policy level, but we also increasingly work closely with students. For example, in governance terms we have the President of NUS, who is a member of our board -

  Q376  Mr Marsden: Is he or she a typical student?

  Professor Ramsden: I think I will have to leave Wes Streeting to answer that for himself, but he certainly is representative of a very large group of students -

  Q377  Mr Marsden: The point I am making is that any individual, however gifted, however representative, is no substitute, as we have discovered in our other sessions, for bringing together a clump of students from very diverse and different backgrounds and I am just suggesting to you that that might be a useful part of your useful agenda.

  Professor Ramsden: I agree, and we try to do that through our subject centres in particular, and we work very, very closely with students in many different ways and we also work at different levels with the NUS and with other groups of students. As I said again in my submission to the Secretary of State, I think we need to engage more with students through not only the higher education academics but also institutions to do that because they have a very, very big part to play in enhancing quality and I think we need to use that resource.

  Chairman: We will come back to Graham because degrees mean an awful lot to students.

  Q378  Graham Stringer: They do. Mr Williams, in your evidence you say, "It would be a serious mistake to confuse a flawed classification system with falling academic standards," and you also claim that all students reach a basic and appropriate standard. How can you be so sure if we are dealing with what you accept is a flawed system that basic standards are reached?

  Mr Williams: I think we have to take away the red herring of degree classification because I do not think degree classifications tell us anything and I have gone on record to say that. I think they are misleading and not at all helpful for the reasons Professor Burgess was talking about and there is nothing new in that, nothing at all. I think the proxies for knowing that the standards are being achieved are largely because of the (up until now anyway) very high level of graduate employability.

  Q379  Graham Stringer: That is a pretty odd sort of criterion, is it not?

  Mr Williams: Well, it seems to me to be a very fashionable criterion.


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