Innovation stifled, claims Derby

The QAA is running into more trouble. Tony Tysome and Phil Baty report

Derby University has accused quality chiefs of stifling innovation after a pioneering course described by an assessor as having "real potential" was strongly criticised in a report.

The Quality Assurance Agency awarded Derby's medicine, pharmacology and pharmacy course a bottom grade 1 and ordered a further review within a year. It also gave a poor grade 2 to the provision for student progression and achievement, with a drop-out rate in some areas as high as 35 per cent.

But Derby has complained that most of the report's criticisms are levelled at one small area of provision, and yet the low grades have been applied across the board.

One of the QAA's assessors who took part in the inspection has written to the university to say the quality of the pharmacy courses "was never in doubt" and that the reassessment was "unnecessary". And he praised an innovative MSc general practice medicine programme, which was the focus of most critical comments.

The report said that there were "major concerns" about the "failure" of the university's quality management system to monitor the general practice course, which it acknowledges as having an "innovative design". There was "little evidence" that internal monitoring was used in a systematic or proactive way to evaluate this course, and there were concerns that no student had completed the certificate stage of the programme in its two years of operation.

Derby University has since decommissioned the course and its 25 students are being transferred to another programme.

Roger Waterhouse, Derby's vice-chancellor, said the QAA's rules for assessing subjects meant the report "tarred with the same brush" the pharmacy courses that had received a relatively glowing appraisal.

"The QAA was caught by its own procedures, which require that a small innovative programme like this had to be coupled with something else. The system is, in a sense, anti-entrepreneurial. It means institutions cannot afford to take risks," he said.