Quality checker needs checking

The QAA has published a draft of its 'lighter-touch' audit, but Geoffrey Alderman still needs convincing.

At the end of April, the Quality Assurance Agency published the draft of its Handbook for Institutional Audit - its misnamed, "lighter- touch" approach adopted after the departure of chief executive John Randall.

On the day the draft was published, a team of QAA inspectors descended on Newham College of Further Education to reinspect its HND in business. This Edexcel-validated programme had originally been inspected in November 2000, when it had been judged unsatisfactory. This was due to an administrative error in recording the date from which the validation was effective.

Not a single student was disadvantaged by this slip-up, which Edexcel corrected retrospectively. But as far as the QAA was concerned, the initial failure to notice the error invalidated Newham's entire quality processes, even though the course had scored 19 points out of 24.

The draft handbook seeks to combine audits of whole institutions, focusing on quality-assurance mechanisms, with limited investigations of effectiveness at subject level. The focus is, rightly, on the student-learning experience, and students are, rightly, to be invited to make submissions to the QAA auditors. And there is, rightly, an emphasis on each institution's responsibility for its academic standards.

The draft makes it clear that the QAA's mammoth code of practice, the numerous subject-benchmark statements and even the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications no longer have the status of prescriptive regulations. Henceforth they will merely be "reference points".

That is the good news.

The bad news is that the QAA is still addicted to "graded judgements". Its auditors will now declare that they have "broad confidence" in an institution's "present and likely future management" of its quality processes, "limited confidence", or "no confidence".

In the latter two cases, the QAA says it will require an "action plan" and even "quarterly progress reports". But there is no legal basis on which such demands can be made.

Some of the annexes contain more bad news. The page devoted to the QAA's "operational principles and process standards" is insulting in its superficiality. We are told that the principles will "in due course" be turned into "explicit service standards". The sector must insist on seeing these standards and being told a great deal more about the QAA's apparent "regular monitoring" of its own policies and procedures before it signs up to the package on offer.

Two annexes deal with the making of representations and complaints. These seem little different from the inadequate processes that the QAA already operates. So the ordeal through which Newham has been put, not to mention the waste of taxpayers' money, should serve as a warning.

I am a former governor of Newham College. The failure to spot the clerical error was lamentable. But to damn Newham's entire quality-management system because of a technical oversight that had no practical consequence seems perverse.

Newham appealed against this misjudgement. It is clear from the correspondence that the appeal process was not so much a quasi-judicial proceeding as a desperate attempt to preserve the reputation of the QAA and its inspectors.

Under the QAA's proposed arrangements, the officers of the agency and its auditors will have considerable new powers. It is vital, therefore, that the agency's own quality processes be externally accredited and that any appeal is independently investigated.

Postscript: on reinspection, the HND in business at Newham scored 23 points out of 24.

Geoffrey Alderman is academic dean of the American InterContinental University, London, and writes in a personal capacity.