This is an innovative and radical landmark in the development of external quality arrangements for Scotland’s colleges. The quality framework and arrangements for annual engagement, subject-based aspect reports and external review reflect new thinking nationally, within HMIE, in the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council (SFC) and in colleges themselves.
Colleges are increasingly taking responsibility for assuring and enhancing the quality of their provision. We are now four years beyond the tenth anniversary of incorporation and that anniversary stimulated a huge amount of reflection on how far the sector had come. Reporting on the situation about then, HMIE’s report, Improving Scottish Education, recognised that:
In most colleges, quality assurance and improvement arrangements have developed and become more comprehensive over the past four years. Where programme teams have implemented rigorous and well-informed self-evaluation processes, this has often led to improvements in the learner experience. Similarly, where programme teams evaluate learning and teaching and share good practice in teaching approaches, this often leads to individual staff adopting more effective methods.
A number of specific benefits have accrued from self-evaluation and improvement activity including: improved retention rates, leading to improved attainment in some subjects; improvements in learning and teaching approaches; and better use of access to ICT to develop self-confidence or independence in learning.
This well-attested maturing of the college sector led to fairly radical changes in quality arrangements for the 2004-2008 cycle, including a simplified cross-college framework; reporting only by exception through other significant factors on most aspects of activity at the subject level; a common phase-one review for all colleges; and a proportionate follow-through phase that in many cases focused only on exploring sector-leading and innovative practice.
Further and even more radical changes to quality arrangements in the college sector are now necessary. A prompt for change, of course, was the establishment of the single Scottish Funding Council for both colleges and universities. This was quickly followed by the establishment of the Joint Quality Review Group that agreed the three key principles and other important values that underpin these new arrangements: ownership of quality by colleges; accountability for quality by Boards of Management; the embedding of equality and diversity in all provision; proportionality in approaches to external review; and review outcomes expressed as confidence statements.
Some of the big messages for the future are common to changes in HMIE’s activity across all of the sectors in which it inspects and reviews: overall lightening of external scrutiny activity; further development of proportionate approaches; an increasing role for professional engagement between reviewers and staff; further-developing user focus, for example, with the introduction of student team members to reviews; simpler and less scale-focused evaluation and reporting.
All of these big messages, along with the principles and approaches advocated by the Joint Quality Review Group, are reflected in these new External quality arrangements for Scotland’s colleges.
Graham Donaldson
HM Senior Chief Inspector