Education: Who inspects the inspectors?

Few issues exercise academics as much as the constant monitoring they have become subject to during the 1990s. The Dearing Review set the ball rolling, and earlier this year the new Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) released a glossy consultation document setting out its views on how the Dearing quality agenda could be put into operation.

We now know that well before the deadline set for responding to this consultation document, the QAA had already rethought its strategy. In a confidential paper dated 6 May, the QAA chief executive, John Randall, signalled a comprehensive retreat from the command-and-control regime previewed in the consultation exercise. We are now promised a much lighter touch: institutions will assess their own quality, and the rigour of this process will, quite rightly, be checked periodically by the QAA.

I am sure we have not heard the last of this story, in which several chapters have still to be written. One of these must focus on the extent to which the QAA is itself quality-assured. Dearing was ominously silent on this subject. It is now time to address the issue.

At the moment the major activity of the QAA is to undertake inspections of the quality of education on a subject-by-subject basis. Unless an inspection results in a formal verdict of "unsatisfactory", there is no right of appeal against the judgements of the inspection team.

These teams operate under a type of delegated authority and the scores they award need no further ratification. Errors of fact in a draft inspection report will be corrected, but the scores awarded against each aspect of provision inspected will not be altered once they are announced orally at the end of the inspection visit, no matter how many errors of fact and interpretation the inspectors have made.

Nor does the QAA have any machinery in place to give reassurance to the sector, and the public, that its inspectors all inspect to the same standard. The evidence of hundreds of published inspection reports is that they do not.

An instance of bad practice which may be penalised in one institution is glossed over in another. There are, it is true, a few examples of institutions persuading the QAA to agree to a new inspection. But this has only happened after a great deal of behind-the-scenes diplomacy, occasionally supplemented by the threat of legal action.

If public funding were ever to be linked to the outcome of QAA inspections, the ability to appeal against any judgement made by the QAA would become imperative. Under the revised quality assurance arrangements, it might well be that compliance with the expectations of the QAA would not be mandatory. Even so, a negative statement made by the QAA about an institution could result in a loss of confidence, especially in sensitive overseas markets. An HE provider in this situation, with a large off-shore income at risk, is bound to demand the right of appeal - a right which is, incidentally, permitted by the Further Education Funding Council in respect of its inspectors' reports.

Scarcely less serious is the failure of the QAA to offer itself for inspection. Like any quality assurance body, it should be subject to regular review by outside experts. Under "continuation audit", the QAA is currently asking institutions how, in a corporate sense, they assure academic standards. But how does the QAA assure its own standards? What are its own quality assurance mechanisms?

The QAA cannot continue to behave as if it were a law unto itself. What is needed, as an absolute minimum, is a code of practice for the QAA, giving all stakeholders a right of redress against both maladministration and injustice. This means that its own autonomy must be limited in future.

Professor Alderman is Pro Vice-Chancellor, Middlesex University