Prioritise students or face more regulation, says ex-Ucas head

I hope that CDBU was offered the opportunity to respond to this article prior to publication. Mary Curnock Cook’s address to the AGM of the Council for the Defence of British Universities (CDBU) on 23 January was indeed robust and provocative, and as someone who campaigned on behalf of CDBU during the parliamentary debates on the Higher Education and Research Bill in 2016-17 I should like to comment on some of the issues mentioned in your report of the event. 1) With regard to the need to shift priorities from research to teaching, as Dorothy Bishop pointed out in her response to Mary Curnock Cook (http://cdbu.org.uk/no-academics-are-not-obsessed-with-research-we-care-deeply-about-our-students/), it is unfair to blame academics for any imbalance in the current situation because (a) many of them show real dedication to their teaching, and (b) it is the financial incentives imposed through the Research Excellence Framework that have skewed the priorities of HE institutions in favour of research. CDBU’s position in the matter is clearly stated in its list of aims (http://cdbu.org.uk/about/values-and-aims/): it is committed to promoting and enhancing the fruitful interaction of teaching and research, not to prioritising the one over the other. 2) CDBU has campaigned vigorously against the marketisation of higher education for a number of reasons. One is the risk inherent in encouraging a proliferation of low-cost, low-quality for-profit providers (http://cdbu.org.uk/private-providers/); another is the tendency for such a system to generate a transient teaching force, which cannot be in the best interests of students (http://cdbu.org.uk/short-term-contracts/). Thirdly, it is misguided to infer from the fact that higher education is now substantially financed through student loans that it should therefore be treated as a consumer good: as the National Audit Office noted in a recent report (https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/The-higher-education-market.pdf), the outcomes students can expect to achieve on university courses “depend on the ability and commitment of the student as well as the quality of the provider”. These and other issues are fully addressed in CDBU’s response to the recent government consultation on the functions of the Office for Students (OfS), which can be downloaded from our website (http://cdbu.org.uk/resources-for-journalists/). 3) To argue that those who criticise the TEF for its lack of credible metrics should suggest some other way of measuring teaching excellence is to miss the point of the criticisms. The maintenance of high standards by the academic profession inevitably depends on the freedom of academics to make independent judgements with regard to the teaching and assessment of students in their subject area. It was for this reason that, in its lobbying on the Higher Education and Research Bill, CDBU pressed hard for quality assurance to be placed in the hands of a body that was genuinely independent of the OfS: quality control in university teaching needs to be protected from the enforcement of a market approach, which is one of the primary responsibilities of the OfS, and which creates pressures on institutions to nurture the loyalty of their customers in ways that may run counter to the maintenance of high standards. 4) In its response to the consultation on the functions of the OfS, CDBU also challenged the use of the phrase “value for money” as a proxy for the quality of teaching provided because, like all political slogans that appeal to subjective judgements, it clouds the issue. In educational policy making, perceptions of what students say they want are no substitute for the independent judgement of academics on what students need to do in order to achieve the level of qualification to which they aspire. Let’s hope that the OfS, once its modus operandi has been clarified, will succeed in discouraging poor quality education while allowing institutions that pose lower risks to students to flourish, as proposed in the government’s consultation document; that the independent review of the TEF required under the Higher Education and Research Act (section 26) will take us towards a quality assurance regime that does enjoy the broad confidence of the academic profession; and that, under the new Minister for Universities, the HE sector may continue to provide the high quality and diversity of higher education that has been the basis of its outstanding international reputation in the recent past. CDBU will be watching developments closely over the coming months with a view to offering further constructive criticisms wherever these appear necessary. David Midgley

Ms Curnock Cook she seem to be a bit of "I know it all" well she does not. There are many crap managers in Universities and many excellent academics and sometimes the reverse. If you only get promoted for research then that is what academics will tend to prioritise, until the best teachers are properly rewarded and recognised by promotions and pay which is fairly easy to spot over time then there will not be much improvement no matter how much "Quality control" is put into place. Also you cannot keep pouring money into ever more managers and senior admin staff and waste huge amounts of time and money on quality control and then then not pay properly the academics as there is no money left to give them a decent standard of living.