STANDARDS, QUALITYAND CAPABILITY: A PERSONAL VIEW

Anthony Woollard, Consultant

1. We are standing at a crossroads in the definition of what higher education is all about and what it brings to its graduates. The issues are highly relevant to the theme of Capability.

2. My main credential for offering a commentary on these issues is that for 25 years I was a senior official in what was the Department for Education, and that for ten of those years I was responsible for the development of qualifications - first in FE and on the vocational side, where I helped to set up NCVQ; then on the schools side where I oversaw the introduction of GCSE and tried to make sense of the post-Higginson debacle on A levels; and finally as head of the Higher Education Quality Division where my responsibilities included the development of the dreaded quality assessment methodology of HEFCE, liaison with HEQC, and also - a theme which figured in all these three posts - links with the then Employment Department and NCVQ on higher-level vocational qualifications. That gives me an unusual overview of policy issues and how they interact with the theme of this conference.

3. But it is also relevant, that as a senior official in a Government Department I was responsible for staff - up to a couple of dozen - most of whom were graduates, and for their development and appraisal. That experience - especially the annual appraisal cycle - gave me some insight into what capability at work might mean. Now, as a self-employed consultant, I am responsible only for my own capability and development, and that has forced on me a lot of reflection on practice, giving me yet another perspective which may not be irrelevant.

Definitions

4. I must first define what I mean by "standards" and "quality" as they have been used in policy discourse, because they are very slippery and some of the problems we have had over recent years have in my view been about language and the use of terms.

5. By standards, or more precisely "academic standards", I mean those benchmarks of attainment which characterise someone who sucessfully completes a degree. For simplicity at this stage I am speaking about first degrees, not other qualifications, because that is where the debate has focused. There are conceptual reasons why standards in HE are peculiarly difficult to define. But I believe that there is a general expectation in the community that the possession of a degree has some meaning. Whatever that meaning is, is what I mean by "standard". The term "learning outcomes" has come into widespread use recently, and that is fairly close to what I mean by "standards".

6.. Now for some people the word "standards" is like a red rag to a bull. It has overtones of political rhetoric: standards seen as something narrowly academic and highly conventional, and they are (of course) falling. Many in the Capability movement would be particularly unhappy at that kind of approach. I believe that it is a fatal mistake to write off the word "standards" in that way. I can tell you as an insider that one of the problems in the Department with many of the things we associate with Capability - records of achievement in particular - arose precisely because the proponents of Capability appeared to be writing off the possibility of measurable and assurable standards. We may repudiate the political rhetoric but we must recognise that the often simplistic concerns of the wider community about "standards" cannot just be written off. Otherwise we will alienate our potential supporters.

7. "Quality" is a different concept. It tends to relate to the process of education rather than to the outcomes. If you look at the "quality" movement in industry, you will find a focus - in initiatives such as BS5750 or Total Quality Management - on getting the process right irrespective of the product, and thus assuring that the product itself has a chance of being produced efficiently and effectively to customer requirements - whether or not it is in any sense "the right" product. It has often been pointed out that Auschwitz might well have been eligible for BS5750.

The Black Box

8. There is a long tradition in British education of what I might call a black-box approach to standards, and, though to a much lesser extent, to quality also.

9. The 1944 Education Act laid down that standards, at all levels of the education system, were the domain of the professionals - the teachers, and the examiners who were themselves teachers. What was taught, how the outcomes were assessed, and indeed what outcomes were aimed for, were no business of Government. However, the quality of the process within which these things took place was overseen by HM Inspectorate, in schools, in FE, and in public sector HE, though never in the pre-1992 universities (except for teacher training which is a rather special case). We all know that HMI actually had an influence on the "what" as well as the "how" of teaching and assessment. But there were statutory barriers to ensure that that process was far removed from Government intervention.

10. In schools, things began to change in the early 1980s with the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative which poured a lot of Department of Employment money into schools and colleges with a view to changing both the "how and the "what". It fascinates me that most of the early critics of TVEI are now its strongest supporters. We all know that it did a lot for Capability because that was part of its focus. Even if originally intended to be very narrowly work-related, TVEI rapidly came to operate on a wider capability front, because it came to be seen that that was what was needed for effective vocational preparation.

11. However, TVEI was not at all prescriptive. The prescription came later, with the 1988 Education Act. That brought in, not only the National Curriculum, but statutory control of examinations at 16 - though at one if not two removes from Government. The black box - the secret garden of the curriculum - had been broken open for ever. Many may object to the details, and some may object to the principle. But the point is that the Government - and I think the wider community - perceived a need to re-balance the relationship between professionalism and accountability. We live in a consumerist age, an age of accountability, whether we like it or not. And it is often forgotten that Section 4 of the 1988 Act prevents the Government from prescribing the details of how schools and teachers achieve the objectives of the National Curriculum. Professionalism was not ignored completely.

12. What happened in FE was parallel but different. There is still no curricular prescription there - though there is no legal safeguard against that. Nor is there control of examinations - though there are powers to take such control in respect of full-time students aged 16-19. But the funding of FE is very outcome-oriented. First there was the Work-related FE initiative which gave the Employment Department and its creatures (the MSC and later the TECs) contractual control over a proportion of the FE budget. Now there is FEFC funding which is quite strongly outcome-oriented and linked in part to National Vocational Qualifications. Throughout, HMI, and now the FEFC Inspectorate, have been influential over quality.

13. These developments in schools and FE policy are part of the the context of what is happening in HE - to which I now turn.

Quality assurance in HE

14. Here until recently there were two separate histories. In the old universities, complete autonomy over quality and standards. Elsewhere, the interventions of the CNAA and HMI - the former with a responsibility to uphold degree standards, the latter to encourage quality. It is important to remember that CNAA's remit was to ensure that degree standards in the polytechnics and colleges were comparable with those in the universities - which is a black box approach if ever there was one, but which managed to promote an ideal and at the same time base that ideal on something independent of Government.

15. During the mid-1980s, we saw an increasingly light touch from CNAA, but a correspondingly heavier touch, it must be said, on the quality front from the PCFC and HMI. Concern about quality and standards was however increasing in both sectors. One very important event for us here is the joint 1984 NAB/UGC statement on the importance of personal transferable skills. Equally important was the decision of the CVCP to set up the Academic Audit Unit in 1990 - not to address either standards or quality directly, but to audit universities' own mechanisms for assuring these things.

16. The 1992 Act produced a new settlement, in three parts.

17. First, within the new unified HE sector, the absolute responsibility of institutions for standards was safeguarded. Section 68(3) of the Act says that the Secretary of State may not make conditions of grant - and hence, effectively, may not intervene at all - regarding matters of curriculum content or assessment. I suspect outsiders do not realise just how powerful that provision is - or how much it dominated my life in the Department. It is true that it was foisted on the Government in the House of Lords. But I do not believe that any Government would transgress or repeal it. Academic autonomy really is a lot safer than many academics realise.

18. Second, the Government welcomed the willingness of the sector to take on its own responsibilities for the audit of institutions' own quality assurance procedures, through what became the HEQC. There is a provision - Section 82 - for the Government to intervene if that system should break down. But Ministers have shown no wish to use that provision.

19. Third, however, the Funding Councils are placed under a statutory obligation to assess quality. The intention was, and is, to ensure that - taking account of the autonomy of each institution and the diverse aims and objectives of courses - the Funding Councils, Government and the public should know what value they are getting for their money. I repeat that we live in a consumerist age, and this was a consumerist measure.

20. It proved impossible - for HEFCE in England, at least - to establish a quality assessment methodology which had the full confidence of the sector. A lot of the problem is about comparability. Comparisons are always odious, especially to academics, but even more so when growing diversity means you can't compare like with like. There is much evidence that the quality assessment process has in fact spread good practice. But, if it has a besetting fault, it is that it has leant over so much in the direction of diversity that it has been unable to define any explicit common quality benchmark and that, in some cases at least, hidden templates may have crept in. This has interestingly been less of a problem in Scotland, where, in a smaller though still diverse system, more explicit benchmarking seems to have been possible and acceptable.

21. For all the problems in quality assessment, however, it has a number of features which ought to make it of interest to the Capability movement. I repeat that it is not concerned with academic standards. But there has been a willingness to look for evidence of the development of transferable skills, autonomous learning and employability which we might all be able to agree are amongst the desired outcomes of HE. Now, since quality has been assessed against local objectives, assessment cannot in itself persuade institutions to include these desirable things where the local objectives do not already specify them. But it has of course been helpful that they have become part of the rhetoric of large parts of HE and it has therefore been increasingly difficult not to include them in aims and objectives. There is a lesson in that. Rhetoric is important.

22. The proposed new single system for quality assurance will not solve these inherent methodological problems - though it could enable a more coherent approach to be taken to the relationship between quality and standards. To the latter I now turn.

The New Standards Debate

23. When CVCP in mid-1994 proposed a new approach to quality assurance in HE, it set in hand, through HEQC, an investigation into comparability of academic standards. I have myself, since my retirement from the Department, been deeply involved in HEQC's Graduate Standards Programme. This has had the most enormous implications for Capability and I want to suggest what some of those are.

24. HEQC's findings so far have suggested that diversity in HE is now so great that there is little scope, except perhaps in a few subjects, for assuring comparability to the point that a national "threshold standard" could be defined. What there may be is a chance to define the overall characteristics of "graduateness" with the possibility of setting that as a sort of threshold. In other words, to say what characteristics a graduate, irrespective of subject, might be expected to have; what sort of knowledge, skills and understanding; what sort of basis for continued learning and development; in other words what sort of capability.

25. Attempts to define that are not at all new. There is a definition of "the university man (sic)" in Newman's Idea of the University which correlates quite remarkably with some lists produced within the EHE fold. EHE of course, like TVEI, has been generally very helpful to Capability ideals; and, like TVEI, it may well have ended up with a much less sharply and narrowly work-related brief than its founders intended. It has certainly been influential in shaping the rhetoric of HE, and it has had some impact on the reality - though, like Mao Zedong on the French Revolution, I suspect that it is as yet too early to tell. One thing which it has certainly done has given rise, or focus, to thinking about objectives and outcomes and assessment which was previously ill-focused - and I commend the Atkins Report of 1993, Assessment Issues in HE, produced for the (then) Employment Department.

26. But does all this thinking actually do much more than generate lists? And, once we have wonderful definitions of graduateness, is it actually assessable? These are the questions which are still on the agenda.

Core skills

27. The reigning list of all lists, in the area of so-called transferable core skills, is that of NCVQ: communication, application of number, IT, problem-solving, working with others, and improving one's own learning and performance. These in various ways play a crucial part in GNVQs and are increasingly likely to do so in occupationally specific NVQs - including certainly higher-level NVQs if those are developed.. The NCVQ approach is of course based on the idea that you can indeed define and assess these core skills, at a variety of levels. But how relevant is that to the idea of graduateness? There are at least four possible areas of concern:

i. the NCVQ approach is too employment-oriented;

ii. the concept begs too many philosophical questions;

ii. its origin lies in basic education and it wasn't designed for higher levels;

iii. the assessment approach is questionable especially at the higher levels.

28. Let me dismiss the first of those straight away. I was recently involved with the RSA Examinations Board which drew together a range of people from education, industry, the voluntary sector and the Prison Service, to consider whether the core skills approach could provide a unifying focus for the certification of achievement in all those areas. It's perhaps worth remembering that, if educators have historically suspected NCVQ's approach to core skills of being too employment-oriented, employers have suspected it of being too education-oriented! The truth of course is that personal development, personal competence, capability indeed, is at the heart of employment and of much more, and enlightened employers are increasingly seeing that this is so. Report after report has attested to this, perhaps none more powerfully than the recent report by the Association of Graduate Recruiters, Skills for Graduates in the 21st Century, which in its focus on "self-reliance skills" is probably the first to recognise that, for more and more people, conventional employment in a largish enterprise may not be what it is all about anyway, and that work for small employers, and increasingly self-employment, will be the name of the game. The world is already breaking down the barriers between "graduate employment" and the rest of life. The RSA conference appeared to conclude that NCVQ needed to catch up a little with this process but that, in principle, the approach to defining and accrediting core skills did offer a way forward and a necessary one.

29. The second objection may be more valid. All the words used in core-skills-talk do raise potential problems if one attempts to define them too closely. What do we really mean by "core" - core of what? Is "transferability" a rigorously valid concept? And how can we talk legitimately about "skills" once we get beyond the purely routine?. However, since I am by origin a theologian, I do not personally have much of a problem with discourse which begs questions if taken literally but which still may point to something important.

30. The third and fourth objections - which are linked - are more interesting and difficult. I have looked at the core skill units at the higher levels. It is interesting that the one which seems to be most relevant to part of what HE is about is problem-solving - and some of the attenmpts at definition here, in their attention to the cognitive skills operating at high levbels of autonomy and indeterminacy, come very close indeed to what we might expect the ideal graduate to possess. But NCVQ have not so far been able to accredit a national series of units in problem-solving, even at the lower levels, nor to build the competence directly into GNVQs. It is a most tricky area. And by definition it gets trickier as you ascend the ladder of learning. The top of the ladder is by definition open-ended. It is about going beyond definitions, creating new knowledge, new competences; how can you define all that without defining it away?