Top-level clash on quality plan

Vice chancellors and the Higher Education Funding Council for England are still at odds over quality assurance as the deadline looms for submitting proposals to the Government.

Graeme Davies, chief executive of HEFCE and Gillian Shephard, Secretary of State for Education, have agreed a deadline of the end of April for HEFCE's submission of plans, with the aim that they should command as wide a concensus as possible.

Hopes that they would carry the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals' endorsement received a sharp setback last week as they rejected a HEFCE paper outlining seven possible options for quality assurance. If no agreement can be reached the CVCP could make a separate submission.

Professor Davies said: "We are still seeking a constructive debate and if the CVCP view is still based on where they were last July, the problem is on their side."

Vice chancellors said that the HEFCE paper had itself ruled out four of the seven options, including the CVCP's own preference for an audit-driven system.

Kenneth Edwards, vice chancellor of Leicester University and chair of the CVCP, said: "The essence of teaching quality assessment is critical self-evaluation and it is inconceivable that this could be effected without external involvement by some organisation conducting regular visits and or audits. The funding council is quite correct when it argues that assessment has been effective in raising the profile of quality objectives. That has to be kept up, but it does not mean we have to go on doing things the same way, or that there are not better ways of doing them".

The HEFCE document argued that assessment could meet the requirements for quality assurance set out by Mrs Shephard when she spoke to the CVCP last December, while audit would fulfil only some objectives. It denied that there was any significant duplication between audit and assessment.

Of the seven options offered, three involved assessment-driven variations on current practice, one an audit-driven version of current practice and the other three varying degrees of internalisation within institutions.

The paper argued that only two of the assessment-driven and one internalised option, which involved a modified assessment, would provide an acceptable level of accountability. The audit-driven option is rejected because some institutions which have returned clean audits have also had problems revealed by assessment. Vice chancellors who favour the audit option argued that the converse equally applies. The CVCP's Higher Education Quality Council is circulating its own proposals for an audit-based system.