Quality shouldn’t be judged on absence of information, says QAA

Regular light touch assessments of higher education providers should be conducted to ensure up-to-date information is available on all institutions, not just those deemed to be performing poorly, according to the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education.

The body – which exited its quality role in the English system earlier this year – has released a policy note explaining what it sees as a quality system fit for the future.

It warns that the global reputation of the English higher education sector is at risk of being “undermined” if it further diverts from international standards, a key reason why it quit as the sector’s designated quality body.

In the document the QAA warns that the English system is “at odds with most other higher education quality systems” because of its focus only on where problems are occurring.

This “prevents stakeholders from accessing clear, up-to-date information from an authoritative source about an individual provider’s quality” and instead it is the absence of recent information that denotes when a provider is deemed to be performing well.

“More detailed, comprehensive information is generally only available when a provider has been subject to regulatory investigation or intervention,” QAA says.

It advocates for a “periodic touchpoint with providers” that would enable “the regulator to make decisions about a provider’s ability to continue to meet the baseline”, adding that “transparent publication of this helps to instil domestic and international confidence in the provider and trust in the wider system”.

Contact should be “co-designed in consultation with the sector, but should be proportionate to the level of risk a provider poses, varying from light touch check-in to a full site visit”, the document continues.

It comes after the English regulator, the Office for Students, was urged in a House of Lords report to “work urgently to align its framework for quality with international standards”.

QAA points out that England has diverged from internationally agreed good practice “seen most notably in the English quality system’s approach to independence of quality assessment, student engagement, transparency and periodic review of providers”.

English providers are now “subject to a regulatory requirement to meet a baseline level of quality”, it says, but this system risks “failing to incentivise providers to improve provision once the baseline is met”.

“Making the English quality system more independent, transparent, agile and strategic would provide the key to unlocking policy progress across higher education sector,” QAA’s chief executive, Vicki Stott, said.

The paper was intended, she added, to “detail what an English quality system ready to meet the evolving demands of students, employers, policymakers and others should look like”.

Such a system is crucial in order to deliver on the policy priorities of the next decade, QAA added, including the introduction of the Lifelong Loan Entitlement, the expansion of degree apprenticeships, addressing the dominance of generative artificial intelligence and an increasingly challenging funding landscape. 

tom.williams@timeshighereducation.com