Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
MONDAY 23 MARCH 2009
PROFESSOR GERALD
PILLAY, PROFESSOR
MICHAEL BROWN
AND PROFESSOR
JON SAUNDERS
Q1 Chairman: First of all, could
I thank Liverpool Hope University for accepting our request to
be invited here today and indeed to thank you very much indeed,
Professor Pillay, for the amount of hospitality that we have received
during our visit. This is an inquiry specifically about the student
experience in our universities, and we are hoping that our report,
which we expect to have published before the summer recess, will
add to the Secretary of State, John Denham's body of knowledge
as he reviews the higher education system, and indeed makes various
proposals about the future higher education system, of course
as well as the funding streams which are due to be considered
later in 2009. For our first panel this afternoon we have three
distinguished academics: Professor Pillay, Vice-Chancellor and
Rector of Liverpool Hope University; Professor Michael Brown,
the Vice-Chancellor of Liverpool, John Moores University; and
Professor Jon Saunders, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University
of Liverpool, so welcome to you all. I wonder if I could start
with you, Professor Brown. There are three different institutions
in front of us which is a good spectrum of the British higher
education system, with very different traditions, coming from
different backgrounds. How do you make sure that your academic
standards are broadly the same?
Professor Brown:
We all work broadly to the same system. We are inspected by the
QAA to make sure that our systems comply with best practice. That
is a five-year cycle and it so happens that the University of
Liverpool have got them in at the moment and we have got them
in in about three months' time. Our systems and approaches to
academic quality control and the way we manage our affairs are
subject to public scrutiny. I think that is a very valuable exercise.
Secondly, on a subject level, we have our own quality assurance
systems which involve external reviews every time you renew a
programme, and at the end of the day we have external examiners
to make sure that the standards in our programmes reciprocate
the standards that they see in their own programmes in other universities,
so there is a cross-matching across the whole piece. Of course,
we have statistical analysis to see how we stand against the national
spectrum, so there is a variety of controls there.
Q2 Chairman: Professor Pillay, would
you accept Michael Brown's comments?
Professor Pillay: Chairman, I
do. I think the formal mechanisms of systems comparison should
make sure that universities are at least required to comply and
we are open to public scrutiny. Those are formal mechanisms applicable
to any institution in the country that is a university.
Q3 Chairman: But you are not open
to public scrutiny, are you, because the quality standards at
Liverpool Hope are not publicly scrutinised by anyone other than
a small group of people within the system?
Professor Pillay: Yes, except
that for the first time in the last couple of years all the external
examiners' reports and a lot of the "critical friend"
reports are now available to the students publicly. They can find
them on the websites and we are required to publish all of that.
While there may have been a more in-house inspection before, it
is more public in Britain than I have seen it anywhere in the
world. In fact, the problem now is that there is such a mountain
of material in public that nobody has time to read it. You create
the opposite in that having so much it is not valuable. I was
saying to you that I agree with the formal measures that Professor
Brown, my colleague, reported on, but there are in-house bench-marking
processes certainly at my university, and I am sure at my colleagues'
universities as well, which are constantly evolving in-house good
practice, learning good practice, and passing good practice on,
not only within the campus but also across campuses. There are
a range of collaborative processes introduced by the CETLS, [1]
and other mechanisms so that one is all the time talking to colleague
institutions.
Q4 Chairman: Professor Saunders,
do you accept that across your three institutions standards are
broadly similar and that we should rest easy in our beds?
Professor Saunders: I accept everything
that has already been said. I think the standards are maintained
very strongly through the external examiner system. Having experienced
that, both within the UK and overseas, I can assure you that the
standards are the same wherever you go in that system. I am quite
happy with the level of scrutiny that is imposed on the basis
of subject specialist experts.
Q5 Chairman: So a 2:1 degree at Liverpool
University is broadly similar to one at John Moores, is broadly
similar to one at Liverpool Hope? That is what you are saying?
Professor Saunders: If they were
in identical subjects, I would feel perfectly comfortable with
that.
Q6 Chairman: The recent HEPI study
looked at the total amount of teaching and private study delivered
in your university and also in Liverpool John Moores in the areas
allied to medicine. The total hours invested at John Moores is
40.1 hours and the percentage of students gaining a first or an
upper second is 51.8 per cent. At the University of Liverpool
it is 32.1 hours, eight hours less, and yet 63.4 per cent get
firsts or 2:1s. Is that because your teaching is better, you do
not need as much time, or your students are better? How does that
equate with your comment that everything is the same?
Professor Saunders: It might also
be because the two provisions do not overlap with each other,
except in the case of nursing. Where we have subjects allied to
health they are different in John Moores than they are in Hope.
Q7 Chairman: But you know the point
I am making, it is significantly different.
Professor Saunders: I take your
point but the subjects, the amount of work involved, the amount
of time in experiential learning in the National Health Service
is different depending on the programme, so I would not expect
the time spent to be the same.
Q8 Chairman: Professor Brown?
Professor Brown: You are assuming
that the students are identical and that they are applying themselves
in identical ways and have no other additional pressures. You
need to be assured that the 2:1/first standard is being looked
at very closely by all universities, and they are not being given
away. I think one of the things in the press at the moment is
that there is grade inflation and there is something going wrong
here. There is not. We look very carefully at this and we ask
external examiners in particular to make quite sure that the standard
of the grading of degrees is the same in all institutions.
Q9 Chairman: So the explosion, the
doubling of firsts over the last 20 years, and the 60 per cent
increase in 2:1s is just because universities are teaching better,
they have got better students, something in the water?
Professor Brown: I would say that
the evidence that I see at universities these days is that much
maligned students are much harder working students than they were
in my day. They are also holding down part-time jobs as well.
I think that experience concentrates them on working very hard.
They know what the requirements are and they are applying themselves
better. I must say that in my own university the number of firsts
and 2:1s is not as high as the national average now and we are
wondering why, so we are looking at that as part of our continual
review of programmes. As my colleague Professor Pillay says, there
are many internal measures we look at in terms of the performance
of courses to make sure that they are producing the right service
and the right challenge to our students. I do not think that you
can equate them exactly. Certainly the number of taught hours
is not a necessary measure because you might expect students to
do other things in the hours where they are not being formally
taught, but I think the standards of degrees are pretty robustly
looked at.
Q10 Graham Stringer: Professor Brown,
if we can go back to your first answer where you referred to the
Quality Assurance Agency whose mission is to safeguard the public
interest in sound standards of higher education. When we had them
before us giving evidence and as witnesses, really what they told
us that they were looking at was process not standards, and they
were just checking an audit trail really that the work set had
been undertaken. That is not really looking at standards, is it?
Professor Brown: It is not directly
looking at standards. What they are looking for is whether the
university has a self-appraisal system that looks at how it operates,
how it runs the operations, how it assesses its standards, and
how it looks to improve its standards and a self-improvement regime
has to be in there as well. Essentially, what they are looking
at is whether you have a well-run institution in terms of managing
your processes, managing your standards yourself, and the externalisation
is done by external examiners' benchmarks and other benchmarks.
Q11 Graham Stringer: But that does
mean though, does it not, that if your processes are good you
could be setting low standards and the QAA would not tell you
off about it? They would not chastise you so long as you did everything
according to the book?
Professor Brown: You may believe
that, sir, but I have experience of the QAA, and that is not my
experience.
Q12 Graham Stringer: Professor Brown,
there is no evidence that they have ever taken a university to
task. There is not one university which has ever been taken to
task about academic standards.
Professor Brown: That is true
so far.
Q13 Graham Stringer: Do you not find
that surprising? Do you not find that slightly Panglossian?
Professor Brown: Not really because
if you take the premise that the most important thing that a university
does is to manage its quality and its affairs, it gets it right
the first time. If it knows it is going to be inspected and subject
to public inspection, it makes damn sure it gets it right. One
of the criticisms of the QAA system has been the inordinate amount
of work the universities did to make sure the inspection worked.
I think the balance is about right now; it is not that intrusive
and yet we make quite sure that our processes, our assessments,
our self-assessment, the way we run our standard reviews are professional
and are improving continuously. We take that one stage further
at Liverpool John Moores University, as you probably know, because
we have adopted the European Excellence Model for the whole university,
of which academic standards and the operation of our programmes
is a part.
Q14 Chairman: But that is self-assessed
as well.
Professor Brown: No, it is not
self-assessed. It is assessed by an outside panel coming in making
sure that you deliver to the standard.
Q15 Chairman: Which you set?
Professor Brown: No, no, no, you
have a standard model which you work against and you make sure
you work against 32 different criteria, from leadership, to processes,
to results. The key to it—and the public sector frankly
usually do not do very well the first time they are assessed—is
automatic, built-in, continuous improvement.
Chairman: Sorry to interrupt.
Q16 Graham Stringer: Can I ask Professors
Saunders and Pillay what your universities' relationship is with
the QAA? Are you satisfied with the process?
Professor Pillay: I think what
my colleague Professor Brown says is true simply because there
is at least a form by which we are judged, but that does not mean
that we cannot concede that there has not been an over-interest
in process and not sufficient interest in substance. I think one
can concede that. Also there has been an over-emphasis, in my
view Chairman, on management of quality rather than enhancing
quality, and that is a QAA problem, but we have to live under
that particular regime. The fact that no university has had to
have remedial processes shows that the UK system is at least placed
in a similar structure and in same form, considering when before
this obsession with the process in the 1990s kicked in, we were
all "laws unto ourselves", "islands entirely to
ourselves". At least that part is over but I think the next
phase that QAA in this country would have to consider is whether
we have the same rigour in our teaching quality measurement as
we have about research at the moment. Nothing, not even the Student
Survey, in my view, is assessing teaching quality. Nothing is
assessing yet the quality of scholarship. I do not just mean research
outputs, because that is only part of what a university does.
Something is going missing but I think these are the challenges
and questions we raise for the future.
Q17 Graham Stringer: What would be
your remedy for that absence of assessment of quality?
Professor Pillay: I would like
to think that the freedom and the autonomy of a university must
be taken even more seriously rather than finding a national mechanism
where again we create these unintended consequence of emphasis
on form in the end. I think that a university must be held true
to its responsibilities about scholarship and as part of its public
accountability it must put up "the measure" by which
it measures itself, and the external examining processes, and
everything else, must investigate whether that is rigorous enough.
I think more responsibility must be given to the university to
actually show why it maintains and enhances quality, with the
emphasis now on teaching quality not just on research quality.
Q18 Graham Stringer: Professor Saunders?
Professor Saunders: As has already
been mentioned, we have already had an institutional audit from
the QAA last week and we await that report with interest. We found
that very helpful and very professional and very probing and critical
of various systems in ways which we felt we could answer, so I
have no problem with them as an institution or organisation. I
think they are helpful to the case. Going back to your original
point to Professor Brown, you asked how you maintain standards.
What has not been mentioned here is, as opposed to the institutional
level, the role of our academic staff in maintaining standards.
It is very important to them that the standards are maintained
or are seen to meet with the standards in the rest of the system
across the sector, otherwise that is affecting the perception
of those staff with respect to how they are perceived by their
peers in other universities. It is not only at the top level,
it is right down at the grassroots in terms of the assessment
procedure.
Professor Brown: As a major part
to that answer we have also forgotten one other thing, which is
that many of our programmes are independently assessed by professional
bodies on standards as well.
Q19 Graham Stringer: Just going on
to the role of external examiners, it has been put to us that
it is an old boys'/old girls' networks, that people who are working
in closely related fields of individual academics know each other
come and do it, so there is no incentive for them to be over-critical
of the standards.
Professor Saunders: I think you
probably under-estimate the ability of academics to compete with
each other. If I were to go to another institution and I thought
their standards were not as good as those in my own institution,
I would be totally unafraid to mention that.
1 Note from the witness: Centre of Excellence
in Teaching and Learning Back
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