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The education battle lines

The early stages of quality reform in the education sector were met with indignation. The few willing to rise to the challenge could not understand how the imposition of stringently utilitarian structures on complex learning cultures could work. Education consultant Elizabeth Denton explains how it is feasible to successfully incorporate quality systems into higher education without losing academic worth..

Educational institutions were first introduced to quality systems a decade ago. At that time there were some academics that looked upon this with alarm, others with disdain. Looking back, it may possible to conclude that alarm or disdain were both more potent positions to take than that of the majority who adopted a head in the sand response in hope that would all go away

There were two major issues of concern. Could the imposition of management structures that were not inherent in the makeup of universities legitimately contribute to academic communities? And would government intervention, particularly through audit agencies, unwittingly change the way we define higher education and its place in society?

Those organisations that looked away in protest at the changes hold a debt of gratitude to those who grappled with the changes and fought to maintain their values and beliefs against what they saw as an overt utilitarian agenda attached to education reform. Passionate words perhaps, unless you stop to consider the essence of education. Thinking about it as just another industry does not really do it justice.

Engaging hearts and minds… and pockets

Education reaches to the heart of human experience. It is about knowledge, the transmission of culture and giving people the skills to make value judgements about their world. It seeks to enable people to examine and assess the power structures that support or confine them, be they economic, religious, cultural or political. Higher education institutions do even more than this.

Whatever its history, education is now big business. The viability of an individual institution is becoming increasingly dependent on its commercial appeal. As competition increases across education sectors, geographical boundaries and international divides, the fight for market share is making it necessary for educational institutions look carefully at their performance. At the same time, the increasing demand for education in a climate of reduced resources is forcing funding bodies to examine the efficiency of the institutions they support. In this way, the drive to implement quality systems is both internally and externally generated.

For the management system designer there are some fundamental questions to address. What exactly is quality in education? How do we know when we have done it well? Who exactly is the customer we are seeking to serve?

The education/training debate

There has been much talk about the differences between education and training. The debate is fuelled by old and erroneous notions of elitism. Vocational training is designed to equip a person to learn a trade or profession. Education is much broader. It is designed to equip a person to understand, enjoy and direct his or her life in the broadest sense. These activities, if carefully considered, do not have to be mutually exclusive but they are different processes, with different objectives.

Higher education institutions can make their position explicit with respect to the education/training debate and many do so for the purposes of market differentiation. The mission statement of the University of Aberdeen, founded in 1505, states that: 'The University of Aberdeen aims to create, develop, apply and transmit through the work of all its members, knowledge, skills and understanding at the highest level of excellence.' Contrast this with the mission statement of the Robert Gordon University, also in Aberdeen, founded in 1992: 'To provide high quality, practice-based higher education and training programmes, research and consultancy services.'

What does quality mean?

Traditionally, the worth of any organisation is gauged by its reputation. If an institution has a high reputation it will attract good staff, good students, large research grants, and funding to enhance its facilities. This has something of a self-perpetuating effect.

From the student's point of view it is hoped that quality in education would look to measure the process of education and the degree to which it has succeeded in enabling them to take part in reasoned discourse and be critically self-aware. In training, the outcome is to be a competent practitioner in the chosen field, be it driving a car or practising medicine.

Since universities serve people other than students, a broader definition is needed. Higher education establishments carry out research, provide a climate conducive to a wide range of academic pursuits for staff as well as students, service their local communities, and provide a watchdog role on behalf of society as a whole.

The single binding factor behind these activities is knowledge. Higher education is about the pursuit of knowledge. It is about transmitting, creating, discovering, redefining and renegotiating knowledge within a particular framework. This framework demands an environment that nurtures free, truth-oriented discourse in which no person should be denied the right to participate, and the worth of any contribution should be judged only on the basis of its ability to withstand the force of a better argument.

To do justice to our educational institutions, system designers have an important job to do. While the definition of quality remains open to debate, the aims of education are vulnerable to redefinition according to the perspective of dominant stakeholders. The performance of a particular institution could then legitimately be measured against politically expedient ends rather than those commonly valued by that institution and its academic community. This undoubtedly would be an immeasurable loss.

In the spirit of ISO 9001:2000, it is necessary to turn to the customer to seek ways of measuring quality in education.

Who is the customer?

There are many stakeholders in the business of higher education, each of which can legitimately be considered a customer: students, institutional management, academics, industry, government, professional bodies, client groups and society. The degree to which activities give expression to the views of the various interest groups will vary according to the power structures that exist at any one time.

Students

Student satisfaction is unlikely to be overlooked in choosing quality pointers for educational institutions. What sort of feedback can students give? Some aspects of their learning experience should be quite easy to comment upon, such as:

• efficiency of the administrative systems
• the standard of food in the canteen o the cleanliness of facilities
• the availability of lecturers for assistance
• the efficiency of library facilities
• the speed with which their work is assessed
• the quality of the feedback that they receive

These are sometimes referred to as secondary goals. Other factors might be more difficult to judge. In a pre-employment situation, for example, it may be difficult to assess how useful the course content has been in preparing the student for the workplace because the environments are very different.

Higher education can challenge an individual's values and assumptions about the world and in turn can lead to a great deal of anxiety. The learning experience may be reported negatively at one juncture, but be viewed as frame breaking in retrospect. In this situation a negative indicator may actually be proving the worth of an institution rather than the opposite.

Traditional performance indicators might include the number of student applications received, the entry requirement for a particular course and the number of graduates who found employment in their chosen profession. However, in the current economic climate students may well trade off reputation for fee considerations and other issues of economic import such as proximity of the institution to their family homes.

There is a danger that undue attention to the secondary goals of education, because they are easier to measure than the primary goals, might begin to define what we see as quality in education from the student's point of view.

Management

The institutional management perspective on quality is likely to relate to financial viability, ability to conform to prescribed criteria for institutional accreditation, and issues of accountability to funding institutions. The performance indicators preferred by management are likely to be such factors as unit costs, increased staff/student ratios, non-completion rates and the number of degrees conferred. The interpretation of these indicators tends to vary between management and staff and management and students. Increasing staff/student ratios would not be a welcome trend for staff or students and falling unit costs might easily be attributable to cost cutting and a sacrifice in quality, rather than efficiency gains.

Where management teams are dominated by career managers rather than academics, there is a danger that long-term viability will be traded off for short-term gains. Considerations of efficiency of current activities may well predominate over any close examination of the intrinsic value of those activities. It is necessary for any measurement of quality to take note of this for there is clearly little point in measuring the quality of a process if the outcomes of the process are lacking in any intrinsic value. This is definitely a case of the 'doing the right thing' instead of 'doing the thing right' argument.

Academics

Academics in a university setting have the dual role of teacher and researcher. Unlike teachers they have the power issued from government through legislation and convention to protect them from political interference which affords them unbiased guardianship of knowledge. How then would academics measure quality in education? It is unlikely to be through the currently popular metrics cited such as student/staff ratios, the amount of research income, or the number of first author publications achieved.

Deming's words of caution about the evils of target setting should ring clearly over the heads of those responsible for such targets every time an academic despairs at spending endless weeks of filling out grant applications and churning out second-rate papers to keep the publication list growing.

Government

Governments across the world are in the process of moving higher education provision from small-scale operations servicing elite sectors of the population, to mass production industries. This results in a process of political erosion of the autonomy of higher education institutions which isn't necessarily that noticeable. The aim of implementing QA programmes is to shed more light on this issue. In order to permit institutions to become eligible for conditional grants or growth funding, many governments are adding clauses such as 'compatibility with government priorities' or 'fulfilment of institution/ministry contracts' to the quality pointers they already intend to examine.

Industry

How can we gain feedback on the value employers place on graduates of various institutions and how can we ensure that this feedback is representative? The major concern here is the ethical question of how much regard we should give to satisfying the staffing needs of employers, particularly if it compromises the needs of individual learners as they seek to become autonomous, free-thinking individuals.

Society

Universities in the West have been viewed as places reserved for understanding. Their purpose is to seek the truth and to extend human enquiry free from political or religious interference. From society's point of view, quality in education would be the defence of such freedoms and the successful guardianship of the treasure house of knowledge.

Keep the faith

A decade ago, academics speculating about the probable outcome of the various contestations of power discussed above, were fairly pessimistic. There was a fear that the slow erosion of old definitions of higher education and their replacement by more instrumentalist engendered versions would change the shape of higher education. To some extent this has happened. The introduction of concepts such as strategic objectives, mission statements and performance indicators has changed the culture inside higher education and inevitably this has eroded the old view of the ideal.

It was also feared that because governments were able to control resource allocations, even if some institutions did manage to adhere to more traditional views of education they would be forced out of the marketplace of educational provision, taking with them the values that have been part of western culture for centuries.

So how can our extended communities within higher education keep faith in the face of these pressures? How can we cater for the multitude of needs and visions for higher education? Would it be possible to start by admitting there are difficulties and recognise the need for compromise? By making room for the expression of differing concerns, a start might usefully be made towards defining, maintaining and improving the quality of higher education institutions in a climate of congenial bargaining. Would such an approach be possible? If so, where would we find those with the will to champion such change?

A glimmer of hope that this might be possible comes from the Quality Assurance Agency, a body charged with the task of policing standards within the higher education sector in the UK. In its strategic plan 2003-2005, the agency outlines its mission: 'The agency values knowledge, intellectual challenge, imagination, discovery and achievement in higher education; respects the constitutional, intellectual and operational autonomy of higher education Q providers, and the diversity of institutional mission within the different legislative and educational contexts across the UK; acknowledges the academic calling and the importance of higher education in the personal, professional and economic lives of citizens individually and collectively…'

Turn around

A very interesting situation is arising. Could it be that the very discipline that caused such indignation and resistance in the early stages of reform of the education sector might actually turn out to be its guardian? Is it possible that quality management might, by listening to the customer and fully assessing the issues at stake, become uniquely positioned to show the way forward?

It could be that meeting this challenge will push the discipline across a new frontier, one that bridges the sometimes conflicting worlds of economic activity and non-commercial human endeavour. It could be argued that all organisations are representative microcosms of society and that as such they should reflect the requirements of all those who experience an impact from its activities. If there is a mechanism that can recognise and give voice to those stakeholders then we will have indeed entered a new realm.

Many of the standards that have recently been adopted have taken us someway down this road: safety, environmental and human resource management being some of the most prominent. Quality management can bring much good to an organisation in terms of a rigorous and representative definition of its traditions, values and aims. This in turn has a way of keeping all interests visible, making power structures overt, and, in a way, keeping management honest

Biography

Elizabeth Denton has over 30 years' experience in education. She has designed and implemented QMSs in education and industry and is currently working with Technip Offshore UK in Aberdeen. She recently worked as a consultant to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority developing standards for educational administration. She is a member of IQA and the Chartered Institute of Management. Her current research interest focuses on change mechanisms and project management.