Higher Education and Research Bill — House of Lords, 2017-01-23
Topic: Education
David Stephen Geoffrey Pollock (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, Amendment 166A and the allied Amendments 168A and 173 propose that the body that is to judge the quality of the teaching and the standard of assessment in universities should be independent of the Office for Students. Amendment 173 declares that no members of the body should also be members of the Office for Students These amendments are overshadowed by my noble friend Lord Stevenson’s amendments that give a detailed remit to a proposed independent office of quality assurance. No doubt he will speak persuasively to those amendments with his customary wit and wisdom, but in effect, they propose re-establishing the existing Quality Assurance Agency, or the QAA, under another name and on a different constitutional basis. This raises the question of why the role of the independent QAA should not be perpetuated. This is not a rhetorical question; it is a genuine request for a response from the Government However, I will not hesitate to suggest that, as it stands, the Bill will allow the quality assurance regime to become subject to much closer oversight and control from the Secretary of State than has been the case hitherto. If that were to be the case, I am bound to say that it would be likely to have very deleterious consequences. I should be honest at this point about declaring that, notwithstanding the respect that it has acquired, the effect of the existing QAA regime has been deleterious I can imagine that when it was first established, there was thought to be a need for a formal centralised system of quality control. This I would like to dispute. Despite many impressions that may have been fostered by the campus novels of the 1960s and the 1970s, universities were well regulated as regards both the quality of their teaching and their standards of assessment. As I mentioned at Second Reading, this was achieved largely through the system of external examining, whereby universities appoint persons from other institutions to monitor their examination procedures and to assess their methods of teaching The detailed findings of the external examiners were private to the institutions concerned, albeit that any lapses in standards would quickly become common knowledge throughout the university sector as a whole. The system of external examining not only served to keep the teaching within academic departments up to the mark, but also ensured a degree of uniformity in the standards within particular academic disciplines throughout the sector. With the advent of the formal quality assurance regime and with the duty to publish the findings of external examiners, a great pressure arose to ensure that any publicity would be good publicity. The quality assurance officers within individual institutions worked assiduously to this end and they often imposed upon the external examiners, asking them to amend any comments that seemed to be critical. Thus the purpose of the regimes of external examining has been utterly subverted. This is only one of the many ill effects of a formalised centralised quality assurance regime that I can instance; there are many others In view of these experiences, I have some misgivings regarding the prescriptions of my noble friend Lord Stevenson. Nevertheless I am bound to support them on the grounds that they emphasise the need for academic independence and that they tend to remove matters of quality assurance from the direct influence of the Secretary of State. I hope that in replacing the existing Quality Assurance Agency by a newly founded system there will be some regard to its failures and some recognition of the qualities of the pre-existing system that I have described. I beg to move.