UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 170-iiiHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREINNOVATION, UNIVERSITIES, SCIENCE & SKILLS COMMITTEE
STUDENTS AND UNIVERSITIES
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Innovation, Universities, Science & Skills Committee
on
Members present
Mr Phil Willis (in the Chair)
Dr Evan Harris
Dr Brian Iddon
Mr Gordon Marsden
Graham Stringer
________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Bob Burgess, Chair of the HEAR Implementation Group and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leicester, Professor Gina Wisker, Chair, Heads of Education and Development Group (HEDG), Professor James Wisdom, Vice-Chair, Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) and Professor Geoffrey Alderman as a commentator on the quality of and management in higher education, gave evidence.
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 data stats 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 Wisker: 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 Wisker: 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.
Q280 Chairman: Okay. Can I come back to you, Professor Burgess? We have heard a great deal, and indeed had a lot of written evidence, about this connection between offering high-quality research and that underpinning high-quality teaching. Do you buy into that, that you cannot get high-quality teaching unless you are doing high-quality research? Where is the evidence to support that?
Professor Burgess: If you care to look at the
admissions statement of the
Q281 Chairman: The great teachers whom I have met were researchers. They were great teachers who understood the pedagogy, who understood a body of knowledge which they wanted to transfer and transmit to excite young people. Are you saying to us, as a Committee, that unless you have got high-quality research going alongside high-quality teaching one or other suffers?
Professor Burgess: I think one of the hallmarks of the university is that it should deliver both high-quality research and high-quality teaching. It would be hopeless to have a high-quality researcher who did not understand how you could transmit and communicate effectively with first year students, and that is clearly very important, but it is also very important to be taught by someone who is a leader in their particular field. It is terrifically exciting to engage with those kinds of people who can in fact enthuse you and who can talk first-hand about the work in which they are engaged. That seems to me to be what marks a higher education experience from an experience in school, and I say that as someone who qualified as a schoolteacher and indeed who has done research in schools over the years. I think it is one of the hallmarks and it is a very important hallmark of a university, but you have also got to have people who care about teaching and I think we are at a period in the higher education community where people do care about research and teaching and we as institutions need to do the same.
Q282 Mr Marsden: If I could just take you up on that, Professor Burgess, but also ask if any of your other colleagues want to add to that? As a statement of Utopian principle, what you have just said is absolutely fine, but in the real, cruel world of careers and research assessment exercises is it not the case that what we now have is a situation where - Denis Healey famously said, "All politicians should have a hinterland," but is not the problem now for academics that they are not allowed to have the sort of teaching hinterland or the involvement in the community, or the outreach to schools, particularly if they are younger academics, because their whole careers live or die by the research assessment exercise?
Professor Burgess: I think that is not strictly true.
Q283 Mr Marsden: Is it true or not?
Professor Burgess: I do not think it is true.
Q284 Mr Marsden: Right, so it is not "strictly true" it is just simply wrong?
Professor Burgess: I do not think it is true because if I look at my own university, I have many examples of people who teach as well as engage in research. If I take Professor Sir Alec Jeffries, who discovered DNA fingerprinting, Alec Jeffries can be found on the bench in his lab and he can also be found working with students.
Q285 Mr Marsden: With respect, you are not quite engaging with the point I made and I did talk particularly about younger and up-and-coming academics. Is it not the case that if you are an academic in your thirties and forties the whole emphasis, in terms of what you actually do to get credit on research, is not on teaching and it is not on outreach work?
Professor Burgess: I would say in respect of many higher education institutions that would not be true. If I look at my own institution, you can become a full professor on the basis of your teaching activity as well as on your research activity, but the research must be satisfactory.
Q286 Mr Marsden: I wonder if any other colleagues on the panel want to offer a view?
Professor Wisker: Yes. I think what we have seen, perhaps, recently with the RAE being uppermost in people's minds, is a focus on research and possibly at the expense of teaching. If within universities you could have a proper promotional and developmental system which supported people to develop as teachers - and I am very pleased to hear that you can become a professor for learning and teaching in Leicester, and indeed it has been the case also in my previous university, Anglia Ruskin - if more universities followed that model, which I believe is quite common in Australia, then young people making the decisions about research and teaching could have that kind of synergy in their roles and know that should they prioritise their teaching over their research at any one point they would not be casting themselves into a pitch of promotional improbability. But I would also like to just link research and teaching again. I think the exciting and inquiry you were talking about with some of your colleagues is one of the things we need to ensure our students also enjoy and that they are co-learners and co-researchers in our learning and teaching project. So developing students as early researchers is one of the things we can do as teachers and researchers.
Professor Alderman: Chairman, the link between
research and teaching is an ideal and I come to this Committee as a research
academic who, if I may say so, has published quite a substantial body of blue
skies research in my own field, but I think it is about time the sector started
to realise that there is no inexorable connection between good research and
good teaching. As co-Vice-Chancellor of
London University, I managed to persuade the senate of London University to
confer the title of Professor on excellent teachers as well as excellent researchers,
but it took two years of my life to do that and I still bear the scars! We must remember that most universities in
the
Professor Wisdom: I have to concur with Gina Wisker and partly with Professor Alderman. I think we need to separate two words, one is the word "university" and the other is the word "higher education". There are types of universities - and Professor Burgess has described the type of university where research and teaching was, in the early nineteenth century, an essential part. It is essential that the people who teach students know about the limits of knowledge. It is essential that they have been researchers, there is no doubt about that. It is essential that they keep up to date with their subject, and you can get some fabulously exciting teachers who are researching, but the central fact about most of our teachers is that most of the time they are teaching beyond their research zone. They are teaching things they themselves did not research. It is their academic experience they are teaching and that is what the students are learning, and that is why it is important to pick up on Gina's point about the notion that students need to engage in research while they are studying. I started working in the polytechnic sector in the early 1970s. None of the people there were paid to research, they were all researchers. They were all studying their subject. You could have called it a hobby because the state was not paying for it, but they were all doing consultancy, they were doing critical engagement with their subject, they were doing a whole range of things. So the life of the polytechnic was not a dull, non-academic, non-researching life. It has been a real sadness in higher education that this split has occurred and I think, I am afraid, that it is down to the research selectivity exercise.
Professor Burgess: Hear, hear!
Professor Wisdom: It is not the central thread in British universities, but once the RSE came in, in 1986, with the glorious Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, then in a way we were doomed because it is the chasing of the money that has done the damage.
Chairman: That is the point.
Q287 Graham Stringer: Just very briefly in response to what you have just said now, Professor Wisdom, the value of that answer accords with common sense, but is there an evidence base you can point to about there being no correlation between research and good teaching or poor teaching?
Professor Wisdom: I cannot find one, I am afraid. There is evidence that well-organised researchers are very often well-organised teachers, and that makes a difference. So some of our best researchers are just pretty spectacular people.
Q288 Graham Stringer: I was going to say some of them are spectacularly bad at communicating outside their own specialisms, in my experience, but perhaps I should not have said that. Professor Alderman, you said in answer to a previous question you were very concerned not to have an Ofsted regime imposed on the universities, but is that not confusing academic freedom and freedom of universities to determine their own curricula with the right of the taxpayer to know at the end of the day where the particular standards are being reached?
Professor Alderman: Chairman, what I said was ideally I personally would not like an Ofsted-style regime but reluctantly I was coming round to the view that you could have an Ofsted-style regime and still preserve academic autonomy, and I do agree with the implication underlying Mr Stringer's question.
Q289 Graham Stringer: While we are talking about teaching and research, do any members of the panel believe that researchers should get a post-graduate qualification in teaching in higher education institutions? Are there any benefits to that, or is it just another qualification for the sake of a qualification?
Professor Wisker: Yes, we talked about this this morning at HEDG. We had a meeting and we talked about qualifications being a necessity for anybody who was working directly in student learning. If your researchers never engages with students and their learning then perhaps they do not need a post-graduate qualification, but if they are going to be engaged with student learning at all, students posting or emailing, then anyone who is going to be doing that work with a student we think must have some form of development so that they can do this. It is a professional activity. I would not want to employ a plumber, just to go back to washing machines, who had absolutely no professional qualifications to do my plumbing and I would hope the same would be accorded to higher education.
Q290 Chairman: But they all do that, do they not?
Professor Wisker: Yes, exactly - the plumbers.
Mr Marsden: But they do not!
Q291 Chairman: They do not. Sorry, we will not go into plumbing. I had a bad experience recently.
Professor Wisdom: Bob Burgess will correct me if I am wrong, but I think it was decided that if you wanted to be a research supervisor you had to be trained, and that has gone in without any opposition at all.
Q292 Graham Stringer: So that is now standard?
Professor Wisdom: Am I right? Yes.
Q293 Chairman: With respect, it is not standard practice, is it, because it is not a mandatory requirement? It is entirely up to you as a vice-chancellor, whether you wish to impose that? Am I right or wrong?
Professor Burgess: I think you are right, but I also would say that the practice is that many colleagues now go through courses, and courses that are -
Q294 Chairman: I am not debating that, but the reality is that this was supposed to be a requirement that everybody signed up to, and it is not happening, is it?
Professor Burgess: I think one would need systematic evidence that it is not happening. Certainly colleagues go through courses of this kind, and indeed they comment on going through courses of this kind. I read external examiners' reports that come from courses of this kind.
Q295 Chairman: The point I am making is that it is not a requirement, is it?
Professor Burgess: It is not a requirement that you hold a qualification in teaching in higher education.
Professor Alderman: Chairman, it is not a requirement.
Professor Wisdom: I said I thought it was a requirement that if you were going to supervise research you had to be qualified to do so and that is where I was looking to you for support in that.
Q296 Chairman: I do not think that is either, is it?
Professor Burgess: I think it has become common practice that research - certainly a huge amount of training has gone into research supervisors.
Q297 Graham Stringer: Do you have any statistics on this, and if you do not have them at your fingertips could you point the Committee to where we can find the evidence and the statistics?
Professor Burgess: I could think about it over the next few days, but I cannot recall anything immediately.
Q298 Graham Stringer: My final question is, is it common for researchers who receive new large grants in research to try and buy themselves out of their teaching commitments, and if that is a common practice what are the implications of that for teaching within universities? Is it a practice that is deplored?
Professor Alderman: Chairman, if I could answer that as someone who in the past did get large research grants, part of which were - on the record, obviously - used to buy in my replacement teaching. This is, I think, absolutely routine. It is so that the researcher can get on with the research and it also gives younger aspiring academics perhaps the chance to get on the first rungs on the ladder, to teach a class. Of course, the concomitant of that is that if your son or daughter goes to university thinking they will be taught by a great research professor, they may in fact end up by being taught in that way by a post-graduate research student.
Q299 Dr Harris: Should they have a contract? Do they always a contract, those post-graduate research students who are "asked" by their supervisor, who is going off on sabbatical, if they could take a class a week? Even if they get a bit of money, should they have a contract to do that?
Professor Alderman: Of course they should have a contract.
Q300 Dr Harris: Do they always have a contract?
Professor Alderman: In my own personal experience, Chairman, they always have a contract, but I cannot speak for the sector as a whole.
Q301 Dr Harris: Can anyone?
Professor Wisdom: It does not quite work like this. When somebody wins a large research grant they have often got subject areas that they enjoy teaching and nobody can replace them, and they actively enjoy doing that. What happens is that it brings money to the department and that then brings the post-grads, and then the post-grads go into a training programme so that they will be able to act as tutors on those courses and other courses. It is not quite a hard transaction.
Q302 Chairman: I am anxious to get on to standards, but can I just have a very brief response to this question from all of you: do you think it is reasonable that in a prospectus advertising their wares - because we are in a market in higher education now - students who are applying to a particular university should in fact have available to them who will teach them, which academic staff, and whether those people are actually qualified to do the job?
Professor Wisdom: You are looking at me, so I will answer first. I am afraid I do not, despite everything you would expect us to want, because I think it focuses too heavily on what we call the input model. What the prospectus needs to say is what the student will leave with, what are the intended learning outcomes of the programme, what are the skills, knowledge, attributes, values they will develop during that course. How the department gets to it I think is their own business.
Q303 Chairman: It is your own business?
Professor Wisdom: I am afraid so.
Q304 Chairman: It would be nice if schools had that freedom, would it not? Professor Wisker?
Professor Wisker: I do not quite agree. We do not agree with everything, but I think students need to know that the learning that takes place is their own and that a lot of that will be independent, depending on what subject you are doing because there are different class contact hours related to different subjects, but I would hope, having just sent one of my sons to university and the other one has just finished, that it would be possible to look on the website to find out who is likely to be teaching him. I would look then for what they had published as well as what qualifications they had and what kind of vision they expressed, so that you would get a flavour of where you were going. I think you would do the same if you were going on holiday. You would want to know about that kind of quality. So I do not have a problem with finding out who would be doing the teaching and what they had published, but I would also like to agree with James and that is that the learning takes place in the student interaction.
Professor Burgess: Given electronic developments, it should be possible to update that year on year in terms of what courses are on offer and who is teaching them. Indeed, over ten years ago when I was regularly teaching in the department I belong to regularly a booklet was produced every year which said what the course was and who was teaching it. It was routine.
Q305 Chairman:
You
do not do that at
Professor Burgess: As far as I know, we do. I would expect departments to issue material which demonstrated who was teaching the course and what the courses were, and certainly when students are choosing options. Indeed, if people are poor teachers you can watch courses be denuded of students over a matter of a couple of years.
Q306 Chairman: Very briefly, Professor Alderman, do you think it is a good suggestion?
Professor Alderman: I think it is a very good suggestion. My own son at the moment, Chairman, is having major problems with his institution where he is doing a post-graduate MA, partly for these reasons, and he is complaining bitterly about it.
Q307 Chairman: Which institution is that?
Professor Alderman: The
Q308 Dr Iddon: Let us come to standards now and I just want to read a quote we have in the evidence, "the degree classification system is no longer fit for purpose for a modern, complex and diverse higher education system". Professor Burgess, you must recognise that because it is yours! Why has the current degree classification system broken down and is in need of repair, in your estimation?
Professor Burgess: I think you have got to look
at the movement from an elite to a mass higher education system. The standard of
Q309 Dr Iddon: What would you replace it with?
Professor Burgess: Personally, the recommendation as contained in the report from which you quoted, namely the Higher Education Achievement report which puts together the diploma supplement together with detailed evidence drawn from student achievements, where you give more information about those aspects of work the students have achieved during their higher education careers. I think that overcomes the over-concentration of students thinking, "Well, I've got to get a first or a 2.1 or my time has not be used practically." There are students who get other classes of degree who emerge from our universities with many skills they have acquired through other things they have done and I think it is a matter of including in a higher education achievement report anything which can be verified by the higher education institution. That way you get a more rounded picture, it fits with current higher education policy with regard to widening access, and indeed raising opportunity.
Q310 Dr Iddon: Let me widen this out to the rest of the panel: there is evidence to suggest that you can get a first in some universities by exceeding a mark of 70 per cent, yet in perhaps a more top flight university where they get the cream of the pick you would be looking at 85 per cent for a first-class mark. How are employers to judge degree classes when it is not consistent across the higher education system - and I am looking at the three other panellists now.
Professor Alderman: Chairman, you cannot judge across institutions. The idea of comparability is a fiction, it is as simple as that.
Professor Wisdom: I think we are dealing with some really important issues in the middle of this. Most of the staff who are applying those processes, making those awards and writing down those numbers, are people who have been working in what I described as the earlier system. There are ways, much better ways, of structuring student experiences than relying on very old-fashioned gut assumption processes about good quality and poor quality work and the sooner we change from the sort of, what we call in our trade "norm" referenced processes to criteria referenced processes and the sooner we get away from the clumsy inappropriateness of the honours degree classification the better it will be for all of us. So I am wholly in favour of the work Professor Burgess has been doing, but simultaneously it is going to put a severe burden on the staff, who are going to have to start assessing very well indeed.
Q311 Chairman: Could I just add a supplement here, Professor Wisker? Professor Burgess made a very important statement that whilst he criticised the degree classification system by saying it is 200 years old and needs changing, he actually made the point that despite the arrival of a "mass higher education system" - I hope I have got that right here - the actual quality of what the students were producing in order to get their degrees had remained consistently high. That was the point. Yet we have seen since the early 1980s a doubling of the number of students who get a first, mainly in the Russell Group universities. We have seen a massive increase where now two-thirds of students, approximately, get a 2.1. It is not just a maintaining of standards, it has been a dramatic increase beyond the wildest dreams. Are your students getting better? Are universities getting more fantastic? What has happened over this period?
Professor Wisker: You are talking about two quite different systems, so I concur with him there, but I can only give you anecdotal evidence on this. There are several things. One is that people mark different percentages across different subject areas, so you might get 85 in maths or chemistry but you will never get 85 in English Literature, which is the subject I was teaching. However, I have just finished marking some undergraduate essays and I feel that where I gave a 65, I would have given that 65 twenty years ago. I am looking for them being worse and I do not think they are any worse, so I do not know. I am in a quandary with this. I am merely speaking anecdotally and I think one would have to do a longitudinal survey of work from the seventies and work now and match them and get people to mark them to see what they give.
Q312 Dr Harris: The question was about the explosion in the number of firsts, not the percentage you need for it but the fact that the number of students has gone up by about 50 per cent, but the number of firsts has gone up by 100 per cent. Are we just cleverer now, or is there some other factor at random that has occurred like league tables? I just pluck that at random.
Professor Wisker: No, I do not think that is it really.
Q313 Dr Harris: That is not a factor?
Professor Wisdom: There was a step change of at
least two percentage points when the research committees announced that they
were only going to be considering first-class students for post-graduate
research. I remember it clearly. I was working on exactly those numbers at
Q314 Dr Iddon: Has the inclusion of the course work and the modular nature of examination systems in some universities, not all, made that difference, do you think, or made a difference?
Professor Wisdom: No -
Professor Alderman: Of course, Chairman, it has made a difference because with course work has come the plague of plagiarism and with modularisation has come the disempowerment of the external examiner. The modular degrees, which have their own particular strengths, have eviscerated the power of external examiners. In the days when I was an undergraduate student the external examiner could boast that she or he owned a particular degree, and that is no longer the case. The external examiner is now more or less peripheral to the assessment exercise.
Q315 Chairman: Professor Burgess, you were anxious to come in here.
Professor Burgess: Two or three things. Firstly, I think we need to be very clear on the statistical evidence. If you look at the statistical evidence through HESA data what you find is relative to the increased proportion of students there are now six per cent more students gaining firsts and upper seconds than there were 14 years ago. If you take it over a decade, it is about eight per cent, and that is based on HESA data.
Q316 Dr Harris: Where you would expect it to drop it has expanded?
Professor Burgess: Not necessarily.
Professor Wisker: No.
Professor Burgess: I would not have said that. In answer to the question about course work and modularity, I think that as you get changes in the higher education sector with regard to pedagogic development, not only have we introduced course work, we know it is relatively rare to find people taking ten papers against the clock at the end of a three year period and people take them year and year and they also engage in being tested module by module. First of all, I think I should say that to the best of my knowledge there is not a plague of plagiarism in higher education, in fact plagiarism software is routinely used in institutions. Students are taught essay writing skills and the way to use sources, and so from that point of view I think there is a check. Furthermore, with regard to modularity, I am not aware of the situation where an external examiner would not be given access to the work students had performed on individual modules. Clearly, it is not the case that an external examiner sees the work of every student. It is traditional that you see a sample of student work from, in our current categorisation, firsts, 2.1, 2.2, third, pass and fail. You would definitely see all borderline candidates. You are likely to see all the firsts and all the fails, and I have to say that is something I have been accustomed to over the years.
Q317 Mr Marsden: Professor Alderman, you have made a number of criticisms of the QAA as it operates at the moment. What do you think the most important change could or should be in the QAA to address the criticisms you have made?
Professor Alderman: I think the QAA, as I have said, Chairman, in my written evidence, should be refocused to concentrate squarely on standards. At the moment it concentrates on process. It is possible to come out of the QAA with a glowing report but in fact have poor standards.
Q318 Mr Marsden: Professor Burgess, I want to ask you initially quickly if you agree with that, and if not why. Can I also ask you, on the issue of your Higher Education Achievement Report - and we have seen a sample of this in the papers we have been sent - how confident are you that that is going to address some of the big issues over the next few years where more and more people are doing part-time degrees, more and more people are going to have to or want to take time out and transfer, perhaps, to courses elsewhere? Is it actually going to address the issues of portability and lack of flexibility in the system? But can I ask you about the QAA firstly very briefly?
Professor Burgess: First of all, I would say that the QAA is a robust organisation which comes in and does a very intensive piece of work in institutions. My own institution is to receive a QAA visit two weeks from now. We have prepared the self-assessment document. I personally have read the self-assessment on two occasions, as have all the senior management team and a group of people. We are held to account, which is exactly what should happen in higher education, or indeed any part of the public sector.
Q319 Mr Marsden: Including on standards?
Professor Burgess: Including on standards where those standards are being looked at as to how the standards are achieved.
Q320 Mr Marsden: Can I ask you about the Higher Education Achievement Report?
Professor Burgess: The Higher Education Achievement Report as referred to in our final report - I think we have in mind a paper version. We have now moved in the implementation process to say, "How could we develop it electronically? How could the Higher Education Achievement Report be used cumulatively, particularly across second and third year work done at a graduate level?" I think in that sense it meets the requirements of portability and flexibility. It would suit part-time students because you would be able to have a running record of what you had achieved. It would also allow you to demonstrate how you had achieved different aspects of your work, so whether you were good in engaging in project work as opposed to timed examinations, and vice versa. I think in that sense we have looked at something which suits the contemporary university with the way in which students go along different routes, full-time, part-time, modular, and so on.
Q321 Chairman: Can we get a response on this issue, in terms of the Higher Education Achievement Report? What is your view on that?
Professor Wisdom: I think it is going to work. What I really want is something slightly different. I want the students to know how good they are, rather than to be told how good they are by universities. When you leave university I would like you to be in a position to be able to make a judgement of your own work, and that changes the terms of trade slightly. So I am not that bothered about how we describe students, but I am very bothered about how well they understand themselves.
Q322 Dr Harris: There is this question of league tables. There is some evidence that as soon as you have league tables people want to be high on them, it is a natural thing, that is why they have been introduced. It is a way for the Government to show with the Health Service that everything gets better and the problems are due to the people at the bottom, and there is always someone on the bottom. So if you have in this Higher Education Achievement Report a quantum, a measure, then it is going to be converted by people employed by the Times newspaper into a league table and so there will be this incentive to score people higher on that as well. Will you not, Professor Burgess, just be repeating some of the same problems if there is a measure in there that you have with the degree classification system?
Professor Burgess: I do not think you will have the identical problem because you will have greater detail, greater depth, and I suspect it will mean that as long as the degree classification is kept in place then people will move to using the summative judgement to create league tables. Basically, as far as I can see whatever system we devise in whatever walk of life, a journalist will quickly convert it into a league table, no matter what you do in order to try and prevent it.
Q323 Dr
Harris: Is not the flip side of the standards issue
the desire in the market just to recruit as many, for example, international
students as possible? Would we not be
better off without such a market-driven approach? I am conscious that you are from the
Professor Burgess: I would look towards a regulated market, Chairman.
Q324 Dr Harris: Just one more question, very briefly, you said that you thought you were satisfied plagiarism was not a problem. I put that to Professor Alderman because he mentioned this in his evidence, whether he can be as confident as Professor Burgess that plagiarism is not a problem because these programmes exist?
Professor Alderman: Alas, Chairman, I cannot be as confident.
Q325 Chairman: The programmes do not work?
Professor Alderman: The software programmes are highly controversial, and secondly we have, of course, moved on from what I will call classic plagiarism to bespoke essay writing services, which is another problem altogether.
Professor Wisdom: I think teachers design plagiarism out of their courses.
Professor Alderman: Chairman, that is true where you have good teachers.
Chairman: You are taking over my Committee, and I cannot allow that! You have been an absolutely splendid group of witnesses and I thank you very, very much indeed. We could have spent a great deal longer on this, but thank you very much indeed Professor Burgess, Professor Wisker, Professor Wisdom and Professor Alderman.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Paul Ramsden, Chief Executive, Higher Education Academy (HEA), Mr Peter Williams, Chief Executive, Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), and Mr Anthony McClaran, Chief Executive, Universities & Colleges Admissions, gave evidence.
Q326 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed and my apologies to the second group of witnesses, Professor Paul Ramsden, the Chief Executive of the Higher Education Academy. Welcome to you, Paul. Mr Peter Williams, the Chief Executive of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education, the QAA, welcome again to you, Peter. It is nice to see you. Mr Anthony McClaran, the Chief Executive of the Universities & Colleges Admissions, welcome to you and thank you very much indeed for your patience this afternoon. I wonder if I could actually start with you, Peter Williams? Some schools are brilliant at preparing students for university, we know that. They are very, very good at it indeed. This is the starting point: how do you think universities could better actually see through that in order that they are able to bring in the raw talent from a broad section of schools and different organisations into their institutions?
Mr Williams: If you are asking me how institutions should be able to deal with the great diversity of students who are coming in from different types of schools, I think we have got a very serious difficulty. If students and graduates, are all to pass the same winning post, then the route they have to take will be different. I think for some students this is going to take longer or require a more intense diet of formal study than for others. For example, the student who has done, let us say, a good A-level in a subject which is not a prerequisite for the subject they are doing at university and then turn up to find he is marking time for year one because others are catching up with him. I think there is a real serious difficulty and there is probably a necessity for institutions to undertake some kind of immediate baseline assessment with the incoming cohort on a department or course by course basis so that they can then, as far as possible, tailor the first year learning to the needs of the individual student.
Q327 Chairman:
If
you look at Princeton or Harvard in the States, they have right at the front of
their offer the proud belief that they go out to get a social mix in their
universities, and that is something which they think is absolutely essential
not only to driving high academic standards but actually driving a society
which ultimately will profit and benefit from having people educated to that
level from all social backgrounds. We
have not achieved that in the
Mr Williams: I am actually slightly surprised you are asking me this, because I would have thought this was one for Anthony.
Chairman: But you are an independent spokesperson and you are leaving soon, so you can be much more free in your comments!
Dr Iddon: And he is taking your job!
Q328 Chairman: Yes, before he gets it!
Mr Williams: Yes. One of the purposes of higher education is to ensure that all talent is well-used, that all talent is offered an opportunity. It is about opportunities and higher education is an opportunity. I absolutely agree, but universities are actually now doing a lot to try and get out there and find the students, to try and encourage people, but that encouragement, I think, does depend on a reciprocal encouragement from the schools at a very early age. So I am one of these people - and there is quite a lot of us around now - who believe that actually the encouragement to take an interest in higher education should come very early on in the educational cycle.
Q329 Chairman: Okay. Professor Ramsden, what is your view, before we come to the expert?
Professor Ramsden: Students will come from all sorts of different backgrounds.
Q330 Chairman: But they are not coming into our universities in that way, are they? Actually the so-called top universities are still choosing very significant numbers of students with particular social backgrounds?
Professor Ramsden: My experience of those universities is that they are very, very concerned to have as wide a range of talent from different socioeconomic groups as possible.
Q331 Chairman: They say that, but they do not do it?
Professor Ramsden: Well, they try their hardest to do it, I believe. One of the reasons why it is difficult for them to do it is because students often do not achieve the right kind of qualifications to get into the universities, so the difficulty has been before university rather than the actual process of selection.
Q332 Dr Harris: There is an argument, is there not, that students from some schools with lower forecast scores at A-level will do as well in their degrees because they have had a poor educational background but are still getting nearly as good A-levels as those from top performing independent schools? If it is right that some universities recognise that and give a few new forecast scores less than that - I do not know who wants to answer this - is it is right for one university to do that and probably get a bit of grief from the Independent Schools Council for social engineering when in fact they are getting rid of social engineering, should not all universities do that? In other words, universities which do not do that are discriminating, they are social engineering, because they are not recognising that fact?
Mr McClaran: I think the difficulty with that proposition might be that although there has been some admission on that basis, I think it has yet to be a clearly established predictable model whereby, by factoring in, for instance, school context, one can reliably predict those students who are going to achieve as well as, or in fact better than students who perhaps have higher qualifications. The framework which the Schwartz Report on fair admissions offered was that admission to university is a judgement about merit and potential. The merit is relatively easy to judge according to the qualifications the student may have. There is yet to be established a reliable indicator for measuring potential.
Q333 Dr Harris: So what you are saying is you accept that it is absolutely true that treating someone from an inner city comprehensive where no one generally goes to university who is forecast to get three Bs the same as you treat someone at Eaton with three Bs must be wrong? It is not clear - and I understand what you are saying - exactly what the allowance should be. You have not worked out the figures for what the allowance should be, but the allowance must not be zero, you accept that, because you have already accepted that that is established? So any university that gives an allowance of zero is wrong, whereas the university that tries to give an allowance of two points, or four points in UCAS terms, is at least having a go and is more likely to be right than the wrong answer, which is zero? Would you say that is fair?
Mr McClaran: I think what the UCAS system embodies is the fact that for higher education institutions the process of considering who to admit is a holistic one, it is not simply according to exam results, and the very structure of the UCAS application (which certainly includes results where they are known, predicted achievement where they are not yet known, a reference, a statement) is that there has always been a collection of evidence.
Q334 Dr Harris: I understand, but let us say there is a university which says, "We are going to consider all sorts of things and basically you need three Bs, whether you come from an inner city school or not," then if that is the perception of the schools which are not applying that is going to deter them because they know that they are not going to get the credit, as it were, for overcoming education disadvantage? I think you accept in my premise that an allowance of zero for that wide diversity of educational background must be wrong on that measure?
Mr McClaran: I think from my point of view the service we try to provide is to give universities the evidence they believe they need to make a rounded judgement about each applicant they receive.
Q335 Dr Harris: Can anyone else offer a view on the specific question I asked, or is it just impossible?
Mr Williams: It is not a question I have given much thought.
Chairman: We will give you time to ponder.
Q336 Mr Marsden: Peter Williams, UCAS in their evidence to us have recommended a shared admission process for part-time students and I want to ask you two questions on the back of that. First of all, if you were to have that sort of system how would it affect the sort of work QAA does in terms of its assessment process, and do you actually think, given the range of part-time programmes for students, that this is going to work?
Mr Williams: I think part-time students need special care and attention by institutions and universities and I think on the work we do we would want to see how the universities address the particular needs of part-time students. The important thing for the part-time students is that they have experience equivalent to that of a full-time student, or, to put it another way, that when they have come to the end of their programme, however long it is, they feel (a) they have learnt something worth learning, and (b) they can translate that into evidence for the degree. So I think there are very particular challenges that institutions really do have to meet with part-time students and it is very difficult for universities because with part-time students you cannot be sure if all the part-time students are actually going to be there at the same time. Part-time does not just mean one model, it means a huge variety of models, and that is the kind of thing where you cannot actually expect a lecturer to appear every hour on the hour every time the part-time student walks in. So I think what universities are doing there is they are looking at alternative pedagogies to look at ways in which they can provide the opportunities for the students at the time the students need them, which will actually require rather less direct personal, physical, face to face engagement.
Q337 Mr Marsden: On UCAS's specific proposal for a shared admissions process, do you think that is going to make life easier?
Mr Williams: Well, it is going to make life more difficult, but that is not a reason for not doing it. The idea that you distinguish individuals by virtue of the mode of teaching or the mode of dependence - I cannot honestly see the justification for it.
Q338 Mr Marsden: Mr McClaran, you might want to come in or expand briefly - and I express "briefly" because we are short of time - on you proposal. Can I also ask you a related question, particularly because these groups certainly come very much into the part-time students area? There has been a lot of discussion on the back of both the Government's initiatives in terms of diplomas but also, of course, now apprenticeships, particularly high-level apprenticeships, as to how appropriate the UK HE system is in terms of giving due weight in admitting students from those sorts of backgrounds into HE. I wonder if you would like to comment on that and - because this is something which has been proposed by a number of different groups - specifically what progress you are making towards a points-based system which would enable universities accurately to make judgements about students coming from apprenticeship or diploma backgrounds?
Mr McClaran: The principle of the UCAS tariff is to try and embrace the major significant routes of entry into higher education on that basis. We already have made significant moves in terms both of a tariff for the advanced diploma, a tariff for BTech and OCR qualifications, which are already within the framework. We want to move on apprenticeships. We also want to move on other forms of vocational qualifications. There have been challenges, given the very complex structure of many vocational qualifications. We will be proposing to our board in June this year a modification of the tariff methodology, which we hope will enable us to reduce the time and therefore the expense involved in assessing qualifications which are essentially determined by the individual choice of the learner making up a package of components. So the revised methodology and also we think we can develop a calculator, which would be an online facility, which would enable an institution to make a reasonable calculation based on the tariff about what is being offered by the individuals presenting themselves for admission.
Q339 Mr Marsden: Just two quick points on that then. First of all, the Open University, which of course has probably had the largest mass experience of students coming in from very diverse backgrounds needing no qualification at all, in some cases, both in terms of previous course work and life experience, in the modelling structure exempts students from the start of their courses. Is this exemption route again something you are looking at? Secondly, I suppose the much more difficult question is, assuming you achieve what you want to do in the timescale you want to achieve it, are you confident that all elements of the university sector - and I am talking particularly about those traditional universities (not all in the Russell Group) which have looked with, shall we say, less enthusiasm at the non A-level groups as a way of getting them to comply and sign up?
Mr McClaran: I think on the first point, in terms of exemption the UCAS system already embodies that within its structure and depending on the judgement made by an individual institution about the part of the course they wish to exempt, it is perfectly possible through UCAS for the student to apply for entry directly into the second year of the programme. So we embrace that. There is no technical or structural barrier to that. In terms of institutions themselves embracing qualifications, I think it has been encouraging that we are already in a situation where something like 90 per cent of the over 300 institutions with membership of UCASA have already published statements on their position towards the advanced diploma. I accept that is not strictly a vocational qualification, but I think there are analogies in terms of its acceptance. I would agree that in some other cases there is still work to be done in terms of encouraging a wide range of institutions to make sure that vocational routes are fully visible to the potential student, but I would point to the work we have done with institutions in terms of developing entry profiles which are comprehensive statements, deliberately designed to cover a plethora of routes so that the students, regardless of the qualification route they follow, can identify their qualification and recognise that progression to higher education is something which is going to be possible for them.
Q340 Mr Marsden: A very quick final point. I think you said 90 per cent, or just about 90 per cent of students. Are you going to wait until you get 100 per cent compliance on this, or are you prepared to move when you have got 90 or 95 per cent?
Mr McClaran: No, I think we are moving actively and our website already has those statements on it. We have a special advance diploma section of the website and we moved very rapidly in terms of making sure that it was brought within the tariff framework, so we have been extremely active in terms of ensuring that member institutions had a good understanding of that qualification and what it might mean in terms of making offers to potential students.
Q341 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. Mr Williams, you are soon leaving the QAA, so you are totally free this afternoon to reveal all! We have heard a significant amount of evidence, and indeed you heard some from Professor Alderman earlier, that the QAA, which is supposed to be the Quality Assurance Agency with the word "Quality" within it, is not doing its job about ensuring quality at all, that you have mainly presided over a process-led organisation and that provided the process is carried out accurately then you give a tick of good health. You have no teeth and you do not look at standards. Is it time really that not only do you move on to a new job but that in fact we have a new agency altogether?
Mr Williams: Thank you for asking that question! It gives me an opportunity not only to rebut, if not refute, what Professor Alderman has just said but to in fact try and establish in your minds the link between process and outcome, that is to say that any system which does not look at the way in which the outcomes are achieved, that is the process, is going to lay itself open to the charge of a capricious and unsystematic attempt to ensure standards. The relationship between process and outcome is very important, especially in complex organisations like universities. Someone once said that quality is not an accident, it is always the result of intelligent effort, and I fear that Professor Alderman's approach would lead us to a series of accidents, accidents where the absence of process, the absence of proper procedure, of a systematic, careful and conscious attempt to provide the kind of education that higher education, universities, should be providing will actually lead to - I have lost the thread of my sentence now.
Q342 Chairman: You were getting excited!
Mr Williams: I was. I feel passionate about this. Process and outcomes are very strongly linked. It is not an accident. It is because things are done that other things happen. Because teachers plan their teaching, then students will learn. Because students are guided in their learning, they will learn. It is that careful, systematic approach which is important and it is even more important given the size of the system there. If you are talking about one to one tutorials on a weekly basis, you can get away with a lot, but when you are talking about hundreds of students, all expecting, quite rightly, to be given a good learning experience then that does not happen by chance. But not happening by chance means good process, so we do expect to see good process. We are also interested in seeing the relationship which is established between that good process and a satisfactory outcome.
Q343 Chairman: Are not the universities simply giving you a run-around in reality? You are saying to us - and indeed you have written to me on the record so I presume I can refer to it, because you did write to me as the Chairman of the Committee - that following last summer's concerns in the media about standards in our universities, about plagiarism, about, quite frankly, cheating by academics and by chancellors, you set up a causes for concern organisation, that you had investigated these elements effectively and basically there was nothing in them, and yet we continue to get literally a significant amount of evidence, some of which we cannot publish because it might be libellous but basically saying that this is still happening. So there is a divide, that is the point I am making. I am not suggesting that you do not investigate, but somehow people are prepared to say things to this Committee which they claim they have said to their universities, which you claim you have investigated and they do not meet up.
Mr Williams: We have looked at everything that has come in and we have done a fairly extensive analysis of the media stories of last year and I am coming to the conclusion that there are some areas where there is probably something which requires more systematic investigation than we have been able to give it so far. There are two or three areas which I think we ought to be looking at, probably, but we will wait to see the full outcome of our review. So far as the causes for concern are concerned, what we have found there is that the vast majority of them are in the first instance either personal complaints or grievances or, in the case of staff, post-dismissal or cases where they have been to an employment tribunal; in other words they are again personal cases. Now, some of those are still sub judice and have not gone through the standard procedures, so when they have worked through those we hope to see them back to see whether or not there is anything in them. I think it is also fair to say that it is sometimes quite difficult to discover whether the personal case is masking a systemic problem or is just a one-off administrative failure, and that is where we are needing to do more work on individual cases, some of which remain open because we are not satisfied that this thing is simply a personal grievance and we want to come back and look at them, but we cannot do that while the cases are open. We have not had the great avalanche which I feared last summer. We have made considerable efforts to publicise our process and to explain what the process is and what we can and cannot do, but we have not had the avalanche. When we looked at the media stories, what we found was that there are two or three stories which actually get snowballed and the same story gets repeated time and time and time again, sometimes with accretions of anecdotes and sometimes without, but the whole thing adds up and it looks as if it is adding up to something which is much bigger than it is. If you have got evidence you can let us have, please let us have it.
Q344 Chairman: Okay. Let us see if you will agree with this first: the universities, not the QAA, are responsible for setting standards. Do you agree?
Mr Williams: Yes.
Q345 Chairman: How can you have a situation whereby an organisation itself sets the standards and judges those standards? Of course it will always come out right.
Mr Williams: That is the nature of this beast.
Q346 Chairman: It is like Manchester United saying, "We are going to win the Football League," so they only play Accrington Stanley!
Mr Williams: Yes, but that is the nature
of higher education around the world. It
is how it works around the world.
Harvard does not have external examiners. Yale does not have external examiners.
Q347 Dr Harris: No, but there are processes, are there not, where they are have to be reappraised every ten years?
Mr Williams: There will be an accreditation process, which is a rather different thing than an evaluation of their standards. It is a quite separate process. The only area in America, to the best of my understanding, where the standards themselves are looked at are in the area of specialist accreditation, that is to say vocational courses, where we have in this country a cognate process, that is to say the accreditation by professional statutory and regulatory bodies.
Q348 Chairman: Can I ask you another question, and then I will pass you on to Dr Harris. Is there any university at all that you have looked at where you have said that their process is clearly inadequate, in other words that the standards they set, which they then meet, you think requires some organisation (whether yours or somebody else's) to actually intervene and say, "This is not acceptable"?
Mr Williams: Sorry, the process is good and the standards are bad, or the standards are good and the process is bad? You can have either.
Q349 Chairman: In either case, where would you intervene, because you do not have any powers to intervene in that process of them setting the standards and judging the standards?
Mr Williams: We do it by proxy.
Q350 Chairman: It is a bit like Mystic Meg this!
Mr Williams: No, it is not quite as
exciting as that! There are two
structures that deal with this. Given
that there is no national examination - there is one country that does run a
national examination and that is Brazil, where they have everybody comes and
they all sit down and write the same paper so that they can check the national
standard, which may be of interest to you.
I do not know how much that costs or indeed whether it is any use or
not, but in this country we have two structures. The first is the way in which standards are
established individually by institutions but by reference to national
expectations. In other words, we are squaring
the circle and this is through our circle of academic infrastructure, the
subject benchmarks, the qualifications framework. I should just report to you that the
qualifications framework for
Q351 Chairman: Who did that compliance, by the way?
Mr Williams: That is run through a process called Self Certification, which has been -
Q352 Chairman: This is fantastic!
Mr Williams: This is a European thing and
the Self Certification involves a large number of external reviewers from all
over
Q353 Chairman: The short answer is that you have never had to intervene? You have never felt the need to intervene?
Mr Williams: Not in higher education institutions. We have in further education institutions offering higher education.
Q354 Dr Harris: We have established, as you have accepted, that the QAA does not control or directly monitor the standard of individual degrees?
Mr Williams: Yes.
Q355 Dr Harris: Let us say you shortly retired and the Secretary of State or potential Secretary of State came along to you and said, let us say, "We are going to have a radical look at this to bring even more confidence to the system," would you say that there was an argument for giving you, as the QAA, a role in checking more directly the standards, or do you feel that peer review, the external examiner system, would give you more assurance on that?
Mr Williams: It is interesting you should ask this, because we have actually been thinking about this ourselves within QAA, exactly what we should do. Quality assurance is an evolutionary process. You do not do the same thing again and again, you must move on.
Q356 Dr Harris: You are limiting it to the current framework but I want to look outside your current legal powers. If you were improving the system, looking at it from the outside, what would you suggest?
Mr Williams: What I would suggest, and what we are thinking through, is first of all to retain the peer review process because that, I think, is a strength, to look more at what I would call primary evidence instead of secondary evidence. At the moment we look at secondary evidence. The third is to negotiate with the better regulation setters the right to be more intensive in our work. At the moment we are very constrained in what we can do through various constraints placed upon us. We would look at primary evidence. We would look at external examiners to a greater extent. In other words, we would go to the institutions and say, "We want to see the same things that you see when you are setting and monitoring your standards."
Q357 Dr Harris: Could you send us a note about primary evidence and secondary evidence, because I do not think we have time to explore it now?
Mr Williams: Yes.
Q358 Dr Harris: On peer review and external examiners, do you think the system is good, do you think it is good but maybe it needs to be looked at, do you think it could be improved, or do you think it is flawed? What is your view on it?
Mr Williams: I think it is a good system. It is creaking. There needs to be better understanding of what it can and cannot do. I think the claims for it to provide the kind of nationwide or whole cross-sector guarantee of consistency of standards cannot be sustained, and we have said that in a number of places. But to have the external check, however that is formulated, is an extremely valuable element within the whole process.
Q359 Dr Harris: Do you have a view on peer review and external examiners, because you heard in the previous session some concern raised about whether they could do the job, even if it was not, "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours"?
Professor Ramsden: My view concurs very largely with Peter Williams's. I think it is a good system at heart, peer review, because it goes along with fundamental ideas about academic culture and it tends to look effectively. As you will be aware, the RAE is done right throughout that too. I think it does need work on it to make it better. The suggestions I made in my report to the Secretary of State include the possibility of more training, better development for external examiners, the possibility of a register and the development of colleges of peers to go beyond the external examining system and complement it. So I think it needs work on it to make it better.
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 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
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 academies 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.
Q380 Graham Stringer: If people see BA, BSc after somebody's name they assume a level has been achieved. What I am asking is, how do you know that level has been achieved?
Mr Williams: Because the universities have assessment processes which are moderated by external examiners, which meet their own regulations and which have provided all the information the university needs to be able to say that the student has met the necessary standard, the internal processes, which themselves are verified externally and are related back to the framework qualifications I mentioned earlier.
Q381 Graham
Stringer: Can you explain this to me then, that when you
look at the time history students in Durham are expected to spend per week, not
contact time just the time to get a degree, it is 28 hours at Durham and it is
just over 18 hours at Reading. Does this
mean that teaching is more efficient at
Mr Williams: I think one of the things one has to do is to be rather careful about the validity of the information you have got. There is a distinction to be drawn between learning hours and teaching hours and I am not sure which ones you are quoting.
Q382 Graham Stringer: Learning hours.
Mr Williams: Learning hours will vary from student to student over time and the students will change from year to year, so I think it is dangerous to try and put too much weight on that kind of information. However, having said that, I do think it is important that the universities can say why their learning hours are as they are. Why students are learning at the rate they are is part of the universities' responsibility.
Q383 Graham Stringer: Can you explain two things, the degree inflation which is going on and what the meaning of that is, and secondly would you comment on what the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information has stated, that the educational experience of higher education students in the UK in some respects is less than world-class when compared with its counterparts elsewhere in Europe?
Mr Williams: Again, these are generalisations which I am not at all sure I would necessarily subscribe to.
Q384 Graham Stringer: The second one, I accept, is a general criticism or generalisation, but the first one is not. There has been a degree of inflation, there are more students getting firsts and 2.1s as a percentage than there were previously?
Mr Williams: I think that question was answered in the previous session.
Q385 Graham Stringer: I am asking for your answer. You might have a different answer.
Mr Williams: Okay, my answer is that I do not trust degree classifications. I have said that before and I will say it again, and I think they are locally valid but nationally when you aggregate them up they are not a useful tool and they are used as if they were a useful tool. So I think the individual universities or individual subjects within the universities are doing a reasonable job and I do believe that the change from norm-reference into criterion-reference and assessment has made quite a profound difference. In other words, if you are no longer constrained by the number of firsts you award on a distribution basis and you move to this position whereby if you demonstrate you have learnt the stuff you get the mark and you get the grade, then that will make the kind of difference which I think has been made. But I find these degree classes -
Q386 Graham Stringer: Let me return then, as a final point, to general classification. When asked to justify basic standards you talked about employment but what the Centre for Higher Education Research was really doing was making a more meaningful comparison with how this country earns its living, with other universities in other parts of the world. Do you believe that our degrees are keeping pace with standards in other countries?
Mr Williams: I have seen no evidence that they are not.
Q387 Graham Stringer: So you just reject the criticism. Have you seen evidence that they are?
Mr Williams: One of the pieces of evidence is how popular our universities and degrees are to international students. The international student market is buoyant. Our international student market is buoyant. We are the second most successful country in the world for international students. They do not have to come here, they can go anywhere, but they come here because they know that they get a much higher degree of personal engagement, which is not known in Europe to anything like the same extent. The European models are quite different from those here and the numbers of students from the EU, for example, who are coming here increases year on year, as Anthony will be able to confirm. Our education is a success. We are good. We provide good education, we provide diverse education, we provide education to fit the needs of a wide range of students, not just a particular stereotype. It is a success story.
Chairman: I think on that very positive note can we thank you very much indeed, Peter Williams, and can we also thank you for all the work you have done at the QAA, and do not take our questioning as in any way a criticism, even though it is, of your work! Thank you also, Anthony McClaran, Chief Executive of the Universities and Colleges Admissions, and thank you very much indeed, Professor Paul Ramsden, and we wish you all the very best with the Academy.