Inspectors 'hold back innovation'

The government must relax its obsession with standards in higher education for universities and colleges to compete globally, a Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals conference will hear next week.

The conference will discuss how British institutions can take advantage of the recent global growth in corporate, mega and virtual universities.

Tim O'Shea, master of Birkbeck College, said: "If the higher education sector is going to innovate, we have to take risks."

Universities and colleges that develop innovative courses also tend to develop exam styles that standards inspectors fail to recognise, Professor O'Shea added.

"There has to be a tolerance of innovation in assessment strategies," he said. "Any inspection should be a formative partnership. The inspectors should say: 'We know that you are doing something new and you are assessing it in a different way, and we are going to help you'."

Poor reports from the Quality Assurance Agency or the Teacher Training Agency should not necessarily lead to the closure of courses.

"We have seen it happen to promising postgraduate certificate in education courses: bang - all of a sudden, you are dead," Professor O'Shea said.

The sector also needs to learn from the failure of its computer-based learning initiatives, Professor O'Shea said. Few software packages have lasted longer than the project funding to develop them. "If you look at this in a hard headed way, you must conclude that these initiatives have failed," he said.

"The state has to build non-trivial partnerships. There needs to be non trivial resources allocated over significant timescales of up to ten years."

The conference will also hear how companies have created their own universities.

"Ford is in partnership with universities to provide up-to-the-minute skills and learning that it cannot provide itself," said Ken Mortimer, who has just retired as manager of the Ford Motor Company's education programmes.

More than 17,000 Ford employees are studying part-time for degrees in Europe, Professor Mortimer added.

"Higher education has got to work hard to find ways to deliver education to people throughout their working lives," he said. "Even the brightest and best need to refresh their skills."

Unipart, the car parts company based in Oxford, has created its own university, Unipart U. The company is exploring ways of offering a set of courses to local businesses under the Unipart U brand, in collaboration with the Heart of England Training and Enterprise Council, said Frank Nigriello of Unipart.

He added that there are now more than 2,000 business universities worldwide.

4 newsThe Times HigherJapril 23 1999 Talent spotting: Baroness Blackstone at the launch of the London arts initiative Paul Salmon