A trip over red tape

Elaine Carlton reports on the energy expended in the assessment race. A growing mountain of paperwork and red tape is threatening to overwhelm university academics, stall research and turn top researchers into administrators.

The series of research and teaching evaluations, which began with the research assessment exercise a decade ago, has led to an explosion in the number of forms and returns to fill in.

Concerns have been growing that quality controls and the sheer volume of paperwork they generate are counter-productive.

"The assessments are holding back real research," says Keith Gull, research dean at the school of biological sciences in Manchester. "They are very time consuming and we are making some of our most talented research workers into administrators."

This year many departments have simultaneously confronted a third research assessment exercise and the teaching quality assessment, launched three years ago.

The Higher Education Funding Council for England, which handles the documentation for both, defends the growing paperwork, saying that it is always asking academics how it can improve the situation.

"Each time the RAE is done we go out to consultation to find out what academics want," says a spokesman. "The purpose of the RAE is not to impose a burden on institutions and if there is one it is a side-effect."

Despite these good intentions, this year's RAE called on academics to reveal the work of their departments in eight forms, while the TQA required essays of up to 10,000 words and a three-and-a-half hour visit to the department.

The quality audit, which started in 1991, is more concerned with quality assurance arrangements within entire institutions than individual departments and usually calls on the registrar to answer questions.

But if the HEQC decides it wants to check how courses are monitored it targets a department. "If we are looking at how courses are reviewed and a particular university has just reviewed its mechanical engineering course then we will talk to the staff involved in the review and ask to see the minutes of their meetings," says the HEQC.

Universities have been steadily adapting to the new procedures. Filling in forms and making returns detailing the work of their departments have become an essential part of the job in a bid to win funding and recognition.

"Ten years ago my predecessor wouldn't have had to do either the TQA or the RAE," says Mike Kelly, professor of social sciences at Greenwich University. "This year I had to do both."

This year's RAE, the results of which are expected to be published before the end of the year, involved more than 200 pages of guidance notes, which arrived in academics' in-trays last November.

It demanded information on research-active staff, publications, research students, external research income, research environment and plans and general observations.

Departments were asked to give details of up to four publications produced by their active research staff, two more than in 1992, and were allowed five extra pages per 40 staff for statements of research environment and plans.

"There is such a lot of bureaucracy," says Professor Gull. "It is an enormous logistical task to put statistics together for science schools and one which is very burdensome."

Many academics had only just digested the RAE notes when instructions arrived from the HEFCE about what must be included in seven essays for the total quality assessment.

This required information ranging from curriculum design and organisation to where students end up after university.

The audit, compiled by the Higher Education Quality Council, asks for yet more information, but limits its calls for an institution's quality assurance arrangements to "two substantial ringbinders and a box of selected material".

Academics are hoping that the assessments will get easier to complete as their universities implement systems to deal with the necessary data.

But they live in fear that the system may be changed and they will be forced to adapt to a new model once the Training Quality Agency and audit are dealt with by a single agency from next April.

"The future is up for grabs as far as the TQA and the audit are concerned," a HEFCE spokesman says .

Some academics are now calling on HEFCE to produce computer software in a bid to help universities compile statistical information.

"There is now a widespread perception among academics that we are spending more time on administration than anything else," says John Macklin, head of the research school in the humanities at Leeds University.