Cheap solution ruled out

Pressure from English university heads for a cheaper quality assessment system could lead to its disintegration, Paul Clark, the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council's new director of teaching and learning, has warned.

Dr Clark, who took up his Scottish post this week after three years as director of quality assessment for the Higher Education Funding Council for England, said vice chancellors south of the border should beware of pressing for an assessment regime that drastically cut down on inspections to save money. Many university and college heads have been critical of proposals drawn up by the joint planning group for a new single quality agency because they feel they will not cut the costs of assessment.

But Dr Clark said any move to substantially reduce the "grid" of 61 subject areas assessed by the funding council would render the system ineffective.

The council had struck the right balance between having a fine enough grid to cope with problems presented by modularity, and one which did not overburden the system, he claimed.

"What we have found is that you need a fine enough grid to take an accurate measure. If you move to a very coarse grid then there is no way of properly distinguishing quality," he said.

Dr Clark suggested that one potentially useful modification to the current system, which is also being considered by the joint planning group, would be the addition of internal observers to assessment teams.

This might help relieve the demands made on assessors to disregard their own ideas about the subject area and concentrate on the stated objectives of the department under inspection.

"As long as that person's job is to be an observer and not a judge then there are plenty of ways in which their presence on the team could help," he said.

"But this in itself could create new demands and pressures, because these observers could not come from the department being assessed, so they would have to have done their homework," he added.