True intentions cannot be hidden

The joint planning group on the single agency for quality assurance in higher education wants to nationalise the universities. Its intentions are apparent all along the line in the detailed proposals contained in its report: chairs of subject review teams appointed by the agency will be "responsible for the team's published report"; the teams themselves will be chosen by institutions but only from lists provided by the agency; and so on.

The crux of its scheme is a series of what are called service-level agreements between higher education institutions and the agency. These will provide the basis for government command and control, since the funding councils are told to make all future financing of the universities conditional on fulfilment of the agreements. Yet to understand the group's real intentions this report must be read in the light of their first one.

The language has changed. Since 1994 the Higher Education Quality Council has been asking lecturers during its audit enquiries about how their institutions set, define, monitor and assess academic standards. In its first report the group proposed a new approach to standards. The agency, we were told, would carry out subject reviews on the basis of a "detailed operational framework". Apparently they intended to judge departments and programmes against an external definition of "appropriate standards of attainment". Institutions and subject communities would need to agree collectively "what standards of attainment should be in higher education and how they should be described".

What a slip this sentence was. It revealed a new world of common university syllabuses and made the foundation for the agency's "operational framework" explicit. And how the group has tried to recover lost ground by means of a convoluted and entirely unconvincing annex to its final report in which it attempts to redefine its notion of appropriateness.

No one reading the report is going to be so naive as to believe that this annex represents the group's real thinking, since it is wholly inconsistent with the main drift of its argument. A key paragraph, which hints pointedly at the ministerial viewpoint, concerns the difficulty of constructing a quality assurance system which provides comparable information about subjects right across so diverse a sector. The need to do this, it is strongly implied, will provide the driving force behind "settling the detailed criteria to be used by review teams in reaching their judgements and the way in which they are described".

What this is all about is national league tables. The review of teaching and learning activities, we are told, will be a matter for prior consultation with institutions and "the form of various service level agreements will obviously be relevant in this context". Here, dangerously, the joint planning group is showing its hand. The comparable information which the Government wants and which could provide a basis for selective funding decisions, points inescapably to uniformity in teaching methods and content.

Neither of the two possible approaches will be acceptable to university and college of higher education lecturers. The Graduate Standards Programme could provide a platform from which the Government could work, but its focus on generic skills has put it largely out of touch with mainstream academic opinion which distrusts skills and competencies unrelated to subject content.

The alternative is the core curriculum approach. In some cases, of course, professional and statutory bodies need to be prescriptive. A common syllabus for pharmacy degree programmes, for example, mapped within well-defined professional guidelines, is now being taught in 16 universities. But when HEQC asked 34 subject groups in the areas of English, biology, art and design and business studies and management whether they would like to see greater comparability of standards, they were told that a core curriculum would "stifle innovation, flair, diversity, creativity and excellence".

They saw the price of greater comparability of standards as "uniformity of curriculum content and design, standardisation of learning experience and an increased quality assurance bureaucracy".

No doubt, this report will be widely condemned and the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals will tear it to pieces. We will be back to square one. HEQC, in its new set of audits of the old universities, beginning in 1997, now has the chance to explore the very complex issue of standards more deeply. Whoever takes this on, we must hope for some planning for quality assurance in tune with the real world of higher education. The trust between the Higher Education Funding Council for England, HEQC and the institutions must not be thrown away.

Anthony Fletcher is professor of history at the University of Essex.

The History at Universities Defence Group has stated that it will not be a party to any centrally directed attempt to devise common syllabuses.