Quality regimes face a mismatch

The proposed quality assurance system for teacher training is completely out of step with the idea of a single quality agency for higher education, it was claimed this week.

Many universities and colleges will be faced with separate and distinct quality regimes if plans drawn up by the Teacher Training Agency and the Joint Planning Group for a single quality agency are agreed.

A draft report comparing the two sets of proposals, to be considered by a management forum of teacher training heads today, condemns the TTA's quality scheme as "authoritarian" and "totally antithetical to that of the JPG".

The Joint Planning Group's recently-published final report won broad support from vice chancellors, funding council chiefs and Gillian Shephard, Secretary of State for Education and Employment, following a long process of consultation and revision.

But institutions have been given just one month to respond to the TTA's draft quality framework, which has been presented "as a fait accompli" with scope for only marginal modification, claims the report to the management forum of the Universities Council for the Education of Teachers.

The report to UCET says there is no acknowledgement of consultation with the JPG in the TTA document. The report concludes that the two quality approaches are so far apart that "harmonisation, let alone integration, appears impossible", and that "in consequence, institutions will be confronted with two very different sets of quality assurance processes".

* A higher education college has ordered a major shake-up of its teacher-training courses following a highly critical report from quality inspectors. Primary teacher training at La Sainte Union College, an accredited college of Southampton University, was judged to be unsatisfactory in all four aspects of provision scrutinised by the inspection agency, Ofsted.

La Sainte Union College chiefs stressed this week that the teacher training courses had been assessed against national requirements, which have now been revised. But the college was taking the criticisms seriously, and was involved in an overhaul of its teacher training programmes.