Introduction
This essay explores current strategies
for educational improvement at the
Further, with a micro analysis, an
examination of strategies for educational improvement at the
Conclusions point out some of the
barriers which may exist for educational improvement at the
Macro Analysis
The changing purpose of Higher Education
From places for the intellectual
elite to preserve their culture, universities have become centres for mass
education (Filmer, 1997). Much debate has ensued about whether the growth of
flexible organisations has served to reinforce distinctions between elite and
mass HE and their respective collegial and managerial cultures (Brown and
Scase, 1997) (Cartwright, 2005).
With primary functions as centres
for cultural production, for producing epistemological research and for the
provision of training to meet changing occupational needs (Filmer, 1997), the
societal role of HE institutions is reflected in the official DfES perspective,
as a resource for competitive knowledge societies (Yorke & Knight, 2006)
exemplifying an overarching commoditised, ‘enterprise system’ of education
(Bauer and Henkel, 1999; Henkel, 2000) in which changes in economy drive
developments in education (Morrison, 1998). Indeed, following the alignment of
Universities with the private sector (Brown, 2004) the overriding demand is to
improve efficiency while maintaining quality wherein HE must bring return on
investment to society. This leads to a chase for the best means of creating and
measuring desired outcomes (Ashworth and Harvey, 1994) and a conceptualisation
of roles whereby students become consumers and lecturers a resource for the
institution.
Changes in the discourse on quality
have also forced universities to become increasingly competitive and
performance driven and respond to employer requirements. Post-’92 universities in
particular must rely on HEFCE allocation of funds, enjoy less autonomy than
older universities and strive constantly to demonstrate return on investment to
stakeholders (Cartwright, 2005).
A changing government agenda has thus
meant a redefinition of HE management and quality of education, its control,
measurement and value, with the 2004 Higher Education Act citing further themes
for improvement (Cartwright, 2005).
Quality Assurance and Improvement
A macro-level analysis reveals emphasis
on accountability and efficiency within the agendas shaping strategies for HE
management, with the emergence of a new language of audit (Shore and Wright,
1999) aimed at instilling private sector values through the technology of accountancy
(Brown, 2004).
Since the 1980s, the focus of
educational effectiveness and QA has moved towards outcomes like excellence in
learning and teaching, employability, widening participation and equal
opportunity, while government initiatives have devolved control of the sector
to agencies including the QAA, to which universities are accountable via
processes of audit and inspection (Brown, 2004).
Cartwright (2005) draws attention to
the interplay of external policy and institutional aims in setting agendas for
educational quality and improvement. In particular, quality assurance and
enhancement should be built upon specification of educational purposes, aims,
objectives and standards (Brown, 2004) and depend on appreciation of the underlying
context and meaning of quality underpinning external methodology (ibid) as well as of how people learn,
interact, sustain, develop or destroy a culture (Hodgkinson & Brown, 2003).
Researchers have accordingly analysed
various conceptions of quality which might inform QA policy (Cartwright, 2005;
Hodgkinson & Brown, 2003; Biggs, 2001; Lomas, 2002) with value-for-money
and fitness-for-purpose most associated with the QAA’s key processes. While the
former is seen in measures of accountability achieved through QAA assessment
and audit processes, fitness-for-purpose is instead associated with processes
such as the validation of courses and with the notion of ‘prospective QA’ (Biggs,
2001); in other words, improvement.
This more formative approach is concerned
with reviewing how well the entire institution works in achieving its missions,
as opposed to meaninglessly quantifying aspects of the system (ibid).
However, doubts are raised about prevailing
processes for measuring performance against each institution’s stated
objectives, as Shattock (2003) notes, in examining how mission statements have
become marketing tools rather than statements of strategic purpose which can be
realistically obtained.
Indeed, QAA audit and assessment are
discussed elsewhere as the exercising of power from above (Pollitt, in Brown,
2004) revealing their values to be in contrast to those supporting educational
development (Gosling & D’Andrea, 2001) and their policing methods to be of
threat to quality (Brown, 2004), or able only to institutionalise compliance
and accountability (Hodson & Thomas, 2003).
Educational improvement is thus
linked to commensurable increase exemplified by permanent struggle, elusive
satisfactory goals and ambiguous measurement procedures (Morley, 2004). With
this come themes of imperialism and domination towards HE, with quality
effectively colonised by consumerism and short-term effectiveness. This raises
lingering questions regarding what is actually to be improved, in what ways and
for whose benefit (Lemaitre, 2002) and shifts focus towards instilling a quality
regime and culture based on improvement, self‑regulation and meaningfulness for its participants (Brown,
2004).
Strategic Management is an integrating
mechanism in modern Universities (Shattock, 2003). Activities of an
organisation must be considered in light of the context in which it operates,
plus all the mechanisms available in order to achieve aims and steer towards
opportunities for improvement. In the case of a university, the main strategic
aim of educational improvement should be analysed within the context created by
the QAA policies and the increasingly competitive environment, leading university
executives to adopt strategic management as in the private sector. Strategies
and policies aimed at the enhancement of the quality of the provision of an
academic institution should thus be read in concomitance to the overall
organisation development aims and strategies (Ashworth and Harvey, 1994).
Institutional change is thus linked
to wider changes in society at a national and international level to the point
that it becomes difficult to discern which shapes which (Brennan and Shah,
2000). Indeed, suggestions that managers shape quality policy in universities (Hodson
& Thomas, 2003; Gosling & D’Andrea, 2001) are questionable under the
spectre of QAA operations.
The academy is increasingly
paralleled to an enterprise system (Cartwright, 2005), responsible for
transforming a variety of inputs (e.g. students’ time, teachers’ time,
consumables, equipment and buildings) into knowledge products, usually in the
form of qualified people and intellectual property (Johnes & Taylor, 1990).
Good quality educational provision
should as such transform students into well qualified individuals, although
this correlation is not straightforward and the mechanisms of such
transformations are often obscure. They are, however, ‘tuned’ by busy
university executives who see the educational provisions of their institutions
at the service of preset agendas, like employability.
This transformational model of HE
(input-processes-output) amplifies the importance of measures of effectiveness
and efficiency in the new neo-liberal enterprise systems of HE; accommodating the
idea that processes targeted to the enhancement of educational provision can be
subject to the law of reason and as such, efficiency and effectiveness can be
measured by grade descriptors or indicators at different points in the
transformation process (Johnes and Taylor, 1990; Cave et al, 1997; Ashworth and
Harvey, 1994). Enhancement of the processes is carried out after an evaluation
phase and is characterised by various rationalisations of the system. This all
assumes that input, processes and outcomes in educational organisations are
well-defined and tightly coupled with one another, requiring a
“rational-technicist approach to the structuring of decision-making” (Levačić
et al, 1999, p.15).
Critical evaluation of strategies for educational
improvement
Learning and Teaching strategy
Widening participation
In an effort to engage in discourse
about what the student is or can be, the support to government policies of widening
participation policy, expressed in this strategy (CELT, 2006) highlights the
need for the University to include students from underrepresented sectors of
the population and for the educational provision to be improved to facilitate
this.
Such improvement should impact on
the students’ achievements, although the means of achieving this grand
objective are not clear. Particularly lacking from the strategy is a critical
view of the conceptualisation of the student prevalent in the strategy and University
Development Plan as an independent individual, well integrated in the
community, economically independent and as a consumer of university services.
This follows what Leathwood & O’Connell (2003) call a “fantasy of
classness”, where individuals can attain their objectives of career and success
(Appendix 1), in the interest of commerce, ignoring however, society and
culture (Jones & Thomas, 2005).
The resultant “construction of a
‘normal’ student persists and is reinforced by the classification of others as
non-traditional” (Leathwood & O’Connell, 2003, p.599), the normality
presumably being white-British students, taught by middle-class white British
lecturers.
Arguably this new interest towards
underrepresented sectors of population has come at a crucial time, in advance
of demonstrations by underrepresented sectors of the population or major
legislative interventions, yet in the context of a slow in intake, an
aggressive critique of class monopolization of knowledge and education and a
call for more commitment both for social inclusion and citizenship (Day, 1997).
Focus on student populations is seen
as significant in functioning to reassure the institution that achievements are
properly represented and responsibilities in meeting the needs of various
groups and mixes of students are fulfilled. It has furthermore been argued to
serve as a relevant indicator as to whether or not the concept of quality
adopted is appropriate and well matched to the educational provision (Cave et
al., 1997). All this should be considered in concomitance to the fact that
retention and qualification achievements are regarded as reliable indicators of
quality education provision. Improvement to educational provision can arguably
be demonstrated through retention and completion rate figures, though
Hodgkinson & Bloomer (2001) have amply demonstrated that this may not be
the case.
However, the true value of such
pursuits is called into question when we understand QA as a modernist and
rationalist construction wherein teachers, researchers, managers and learners
are no more than disembodied, socially-decontextualised and purely cognitive
entities. From this view, it is unlikely that an underrepresented student will
ever be integrated, but will rather be standardized and assimilated within the
transformative model of input-process-output. Simply seeking quantitative
change through increasing the number of female, black, disabled, working class
or otherwise traditionally underrepresented students, does not guarantee that
education for such individuals has improved (Pugh et al, 2005) or that the
educational provision of the University may improve on the aspects which have
apparently, up to now, cut such ‘classes’ out of education. All this inevitably
falls short of a radical transformation of HE and indeed even carries the risk
of “a remediation ethos as the different forms of knowledge have not been
transformed by democratizing interventions linked to social inclusion,
citizenship and pluralization.” (Morley, 2003, p.147). Indeed, from the L&T
Strategy, a PI of the type “how many students have been freed from their class”
is missing.
Lifelong learning
The L&T strategy highlights a commitment to lifelong
learning for students and staff. Simplistically, a question regarding the
effects of educational improvement over student achievements is formulated,
finding rational correspondence of cause and effect between educational
improvement, staff expertise development in teaching and learning, retention
and progression of students towards the degree of their choice.
Continuous improvement of the
quality of learning and teaching at the
However, the strategy fails to
consider current staff expertise and individual career aspirations. Instead
academics are expected to be at its service, willing to engage in an endless,
open-ended arrangement; on a journey without a destination, to travel
hopefully, but never to arrive (Morley, 2003). While continuous improvement may
have a desirable and credible surface agenda linked to commensurable increase,
it has been criticised for its ambiguity of measurement procedures and tendency
to induce a permanent sense of struggle, suggesting an obscured undercurrent of
power and control (ibid). This may
well, in conjunction with lifelong learning and the learning society, have a
profound effect on HE.
In fact, at regional level, the
In reality, lifelong learning and
continuous improvement present a number of contradictions with regard to their
objectives. In particular, continuous improvement represents the bettering of
the educational provision demonstrated through quantitative outputs of
processes such as Performance Indicators, whereas lifelong learning suggests a
continuous building of subjective understanding, part of everyday experiences
of students. Subjectivity is not easily reducible to manageable factors and
measurable outcomes, rendering lifelong learning and widening participation
difficult to quantify when learning is pursued as an end in itself. Students’
motivations towards their studies may transform from instrumental to finding
fulfilment in bettering their intellectual life, whereby the real value of
education and indicators of educational improvement are in encouraging students
to adopt deeper conceptions of and approaches to their studies (Biggs, 1999;
Entwistle, 1988; Prosser & Trigwell, 1999, Ramsden, 2004). In fact, such
indicators are absent from the strategy, which instead encourages students to
adopt a strategic and highly instrumental approach to their studies.
Despite this, the processes aimed at
evaluating the effectiveness of the L&T Strategy favour a rational
understanding of what students want, are and how to teach to them.
Emerging themes: Educational Improvement reinterpreted as power, control
and performativity
Influenced by the performative
thinking evident within external quality policies, the development of
indicators of teaching performance and the language in which they are couched
becomes institutionalised. Consequently, such indicators may come to be used
predominantly for image management and protection of interests at various
levels in the organization, rather than for genuine and tangible student
benefits.
Vagueness within the Wolverhampton L&T
Strategy which results in the implementation of the strategic priorities and
evaluation of the effectiveness of such implementations being deferred to local
departments to Deans and Associate Deans, may in this light be understood to
have been deliberately included. Morley (2004) advises on the sub-textual
agenda of continuous improvement theorized in governability terms as : “an
example of capillary power in that it is everywhere and permeates
organizational priorities, social relations and personal and professional
aspirations” (p.11) such that the L&T Strategy may be understood to have
been delineated to render organizational substrates more accountable to Deans
and Associate Deans, who “have means to punish and deter agent malfeance”
(Hoecht, 2006, p.544).
This finds resonance with criticisms
of audit systems in HE as ‘political technologies’ (Shore & Wright, 1999,
p.558), which redefine social relationships in terms of power sharing and
control between scrutinizers and observed. Processes of auditing, that is
evaluating whether or not targets are met, evoke ideas of scrutiny, examination
and inspection as a public event, which may not be concerned only with the
quality of performance. Instead, such processes may well be concerned only with
the systems that are in place to govern quality (Power, 1994), by displacing
local structures of trust. Consequently, any form of local organization, where
individuals can autonomously and professionally engage in a discourse on
quality, is unthinkable.
The L&T strategy operationalises
the corporate development plan of the University for all the aspects related to
the improvement of the educational provision. Its impact, however, can reach
very far, by concealing its theoretical weaknesses, by masking the oppression
of operational workers, by building trust on mistrust and by shaping contexts in
which it has to thrive, behind a fiction of coherence and unity where
misrecognition and inequalities can find fertile ground. At all affects, it
pursues a rational organization of control systems. The rational agenda of
quality transformations and the reductionism of the L&T strategy, stems
perhaps from the consumer paradigms emerging in HE, the marketisation and
massification of HE.
Student Evaluation
Student evaluation of teaching is a
method used throughout HE institutions to assess teaching quality, which should
identify areas for improvement to the educational provision after evaluation (Cave
et al, 1997). By identifying areas of curriculum, teaching or assessment which
may need improving it is possible to have an impact on the overall perceived or
actual quality of the educational provision. Such evaluations tend to focus
upon systematically measuring satisfaction with teaching methods, materials and
resources, often using questionnaires (Outcalt, 1980; George & Cowan, 1999).
Accordingly, their adoption has been most heavily informed by quality audits
and teaching quality assessment exercises required by external agencies (Cave
et al, 1997). The data gathered is often used as an indicator of educational
quality, primarily through evaluating the performance of teaching staff.
At the
Moreover, it should be noted that,
although post-course evaluation questionnaires have attracted the nickname
‘happiness sheets’ (George & Cowan, 1999) because they tend to encourage
students to provide the information students believe staff want to see, aware
that their feedback can have no impact on improving their own studies,
Wolverhampton continues to employ such methods within its strategies for
educational improvement. To make matters worse, the University does not appear
to have in place any mechanisms to counteract the tendency of such evaluations to
measure charisma and the inseparability of student feedback from individual learning
conceptions (Biggs, 2001) or to put into context comments which may be either
superficially optimistic or unfairly critical towards individual teachers.
There are indications that the data
obtained from the questionnaires may be used to exercise subjugation and
punitive oppression towards staff who do not fit the standard profile and
expectations of the University’s management; who may be ‘maverick but effective
performers’ (Cave et al, 1997, p.150). Certainly, inappropriate use of such
evaluations by managers in other universities to evaluate performance of
teaching staff and identify poor teaching for remediation (Gosling &
D’Andrea, 2001) has led to suggestions that student evaluations, which, as a
quality measure, are predominantly driven by bureaucracy and ideas about what
quality represents rather than by educational concerns (Moore & Kuol, 2005)
have lost their power to instigate educational improvement at all (Gosling
& D’Andrea, 2001). Their value in bringing about worthwhile change to the
curriculum at
Further, while Gosling and D’Andrea
(2001) suggest that student views should only be used as part of a dialogue
aimed at reviewing the curriculum and under no circumstances should they be used
to judge the personal performance of individual members of staff, it is
difficult to see this in practice at
Other criticisms regarding the
ability of lecturer behaviour or course characteristics to provide valid
indicators about student learning in light of the nature of teaching as
multidimensional (Mathias, 1996; Cave et al, 1997) and of learning as
problematic, uncertain and relative (Ramsden, 2003), contribute to doubts that
the procedures adopted at Wolverhampton can capture the subjective and
idiosyncratic aspects of quality and learning required to develop teaching
practice. Such summative approaches are of little value for teaching compared
to alternative formative methods (Brookfield, 1995) that could be adopted
within the University, aimed at informing individual teaching practice (Gosling
& D’Andrea, 2001).
Peer review
Peer review, whether internal or
external to the organisation, is well-established as a means for reviewing the
educational function of HE institutions, that, in the context of funding
council assessments of quality teaching, can function as an indicator of
performance (Cave et al, 1997). The result of such exercise is primarily the
generation of summative data about teaching quality to be used to identify
areas for improvement and impact on the overall quality of provision.
At the
The Academic Board has previously accepted
recommendations to replace this practice of teaching observation emerging from
the QAA inspection model, with an alternative process of peer review aimed at enhancing
the student experience and identifying staff development needs (CELT, 2003) in
accordance with the learning and teaching strategy and its drive to ‘encourage the
progressive implementation of reflective practice’. Given the strong arguments
for the benefits of replacing observation with review as a more formative and
developmental approach to quality improvement, the decision by some departments
to maintain the observation-based model appears to indicate the prioritising of
accountability and control over the more laudable aims of review.
Indeed, strong criticisms have been
directed towards teaching observation for its association with management
processes (Gosling & D’Andrea, 2001).
However, despite the suggestion that
self-inquiry into practice in a non-punitive ethos is essential if critical
issues in learning and teaching are to be fully acknowledged and addressed (ibid), some managers at the University
of Wolverhampton retain a process which encourages little, if any, formal
occasion for improvement-focussed enquiry into teaching quality, as well as
providing a snapshot of an unrepresentative teaching event without opportunity
for feedback or self-reflection on practice (ibid).
Moreover, academics tend to hold
unfavourable opinions towards teaching observation, as recent semi-structured
interviews conducted by the author with the majority of academic staff within
the
Other research supports academic
perceptions of teaching observation as a burden and exercise pervaded by lack
of trust, accountability and bureaucracy (Newton, 2002, Newton, 2000) with
themes of resistance, artificiality, scrutinisation and reductionism identified
(Cockburn, 2005).
Such criticisms from academics
required to conduct the process make the prospect of serious improvement to
teaching through teaching observation, unlikely. However, without an underlying
ethos of discussion and exchange of ideas about teaching and learning (Gosling
& D’Andrea, 2001), the developmental aspect of peer review to enhance
quality, support professional development of lecturers and further the
professionalisation of the teaching process (Lomas & Nicholls, 2005, sic) cannot be exploited. As Douglas and
Douglas (2006) suggest, a basic culture of criticism is first needed in order
for a quality improvement culture to thrive; a culture founded on respect for
the moral authority of peers rather than the ‘naked power’ of managers and
external agencies (Brennon & Shah, 2000) as pervades in the School of
Computing and IT.
Curriculum development and student employability
In recent years, the process of
subject review has facilitated the monitoring and standardisation of the
quality of university degrees across institutions. Across the sector, the
influence of externally-prescribed course standards has been to bring about the
adoption of a learning outcomes model for curriculum design (Gosling &
D’Andrea, 2001).
Under such a framework, the general
objective underpinning curriculum development is that of improving the
educational provision, which should in theory, satisfy the question ‘what is
Higher Education for?’ In context of Wolverhampton, part of the answer to this
question concerns producing employable students, primarily for the local
economy, through a vocationally-focussed curriculum (
Accordingly, the design, updating
and evaluation of the courses has, in recent years, been encompassed within
subject review through a rational outcomes-led model of curriculum development,
whereby statements of outcomes guide the design of teaching materials and
assessment exercises.
Kemp (1999) identifies and
criticizes the rational curriculum planning scheme active at the
Criticism is as such directed
towards the rational model of curriculum planning active at The University of
Wolverhampton, which treats people as processors of information, highlighting
how, in concentrating only on aspects of the curricula endorsed by quasi‑scientifically
defined learning outcomes, students are ill prepared for careers in a
non-existent, totally rational world.
Knight and Yorke (2004) support the
argument that it is a mistake to rely substantially on rational curriculum
planning. In other words, the outcomes desirable for achieving employability
and other aspects of ‘good learning’ (Yorke & Knight, 2006) should not be
the starting point for designing teaching. This is nonetheless contrary to the
traditional approach to curriculum development planning that the
There is clearly a close interaction
between the quality of student learning and student employability (Knight &
Yorke, 2004) as evidenced by the strong emphasis on employability within the
Learning and Teaching Strategy. In particular, the ‘complex learning’ and
higher order learning skills argued to be essential to a curriculum supportive
of employability, should be integrated in a way consistent with academic values
and constant throughout the educational programme (ibid).
This means addressing criticisms that
generic and transferable skills talked about in the employability literature
(Page, 1998; Castley & Stowell, 1998; Connor, 1999) contribute to the idea
that modern degrees provide students with ‘useless professionalization’ and the
false belief that such qualifications can bring about the subversion of
existing hierarchical social stratification (Filmer, 1997) as the discussion on
the L&T strategy above elucidates.
Equally it means addressing the
emphasis on ‘product specifications’ which serves, in demarcating expectations,
rights and responsibilities, to reinforce a technocratic instrumental view of
knowledge, away from epistemological foundations (Morley, 2003, p.129). That
is, strategic learning as a means of gaining employment success, as opposed to deeper
learning, so much appreciated within the academy, as seen above.
In this way, intellectual habits and
professional possibilities are colonised by the language of audit,
proceduralism, the quality assurance ideology and accountability pervading the
curriculum design process (Power, 1994; Power, 1997; Shore & Wright, 1999;
Morley; 2003; Cooper in Gosling & D’Andrea, 2001; Lemaitre; 2002).
Traditional dialogues about professional values and academic relevance are
replaced by externally determined criteria and learning outcomes informed by
market forces.
Indeed, as students become more and
more consumers of an expensive product, rather than recipients of welfare, the
Practical examples of the
implications of this include the restriction in place on major curricular
changes without going through the filter of both School Managers and external
(to the School) standing panels. While such practices present bureaucratic
barriers to academics at Wolverhampton, they are upheld because, as Brennan and
Shah (2001) explain, such models of quality assessment are inherently political
and aimed at making sure that the quality ‘values’ across the institution remain
stable and invariant. While this leads to a loss of professorial power and of
trust among educators (Bottery, 2005) or towards them (Gosling & D’Andrea,
2001;
Conclusions
The policies and strategies for
educational improvement at the
This essay, has raised questions, as
to the extent to which the new ‘student-consumers’ are actually ‘served’ well
by the existing quality regime at
A summary examination of some example
strategies for educational improvement at the
Scrutiny of the Learning and
teaching policy in particular has highlighted key objectives with regard to quantitative
measures of widening participation, lifelong learning, continuous improvement
and criticised shortfallings in such policies with regard to improving the
quality, in terms of depth and personal relevance, of learning. Indeed, educational
improvement at
The essay has
explored the practice of obtaining student evaluations at the
Together, these strategies present a
picture of the University as an institution responding directly and largely
uncritically, to external quality processes. There is evidence of the expectation
for actors within the University’s quality scenarios to demonstrate compliance
with a culture and language. Contrary to a truly meritocratic organisation,
discourse on the quality regime, despite observable reverence to critical
thinking within the general curriculum, is not facilitated and often brings
severe punitive action: Action which can only damage efforts at fostering a
culture of educational improvement and conscientiousness regarding the quality
of provision.
The
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