Editorial

Citation

Dalrymple, J. (2012), "Editorial", Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/qae.2012.12020caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Quality Assurance in Education, Volume 20, Issue 3

In the last few decades, there has been increasing recognition in most jurisdictions that there is a causal link between a better educated population and a more prosperous economy. Educational institutions have been seen as part of the economic development infrastructure of the country, underpinning innovation in public policy and programs as well as increasing wealth creation through innovative products and services. One of the major considerations in the service quality literature is the potential customer’s ease of access to the services that they seek to benefit from. In response to the imperative of improved educational opportunity, most jurisdictions now have universal education provision at the primary school level and many also have universal provision at the secondary school level. In many jurisdictions, participation in primary education and at least some secondary education has been mandated by legislation.

The increasing complexity of societies, workplaces and technological environments has resulted in the recognition that increased participation in tertiary education is essential if the economic growth and standard of living aspirations of the population are to be attained. There is also recognition of the importance of internationalisation of the curriculum to enable tertiary educated graduates to move on to the next phase of their career adequately prepared for the contexts and environments that they will encounter. Thus, many institutions also incorporate study tours and study opportunities in other countries into their degree programs.

As a consequence of these and other developments, the delivery of education at all levels has become much more demanding of service providers, managers and the systems and technologies that are used to support the provision of education. This, in turn, has resulted in rapidly increasing demands being made on the systems that support quality assurance in the education environment. Simplicity was having a teacher and a relatively homogeneous group of students in a classroom with a summative assessment at the end of term. This has been replaced by the complexity of multiple campuses, formative and summative assessment, advanced information and communications technologies, students from many cultural backgrounds, new configurations of learning spaces, interpretation of the assessments made of student’s work in other jurisdictions to incorporate into the student’s academic record, as well as enabling “blended learning” and managing expectations in the context of a society that is much more conscious of consumer rights.

This level of complexity has developed in a context of increasing requirements for accountability on the part of education establishments at all levels. There is a need to be accountable for all aspects of the complex educational environment to a variety of diverse stakeholders. One of the most prominent stakeholders, government, has introduced a system of monitoring of educational institutions, in some cases mandating the school curriculum and in other cases introducing agencies of government that monitor quality assurance and report on institutions individually and publicly. The Australian government has recently replaced the Australian Universities’ Quality Agency with the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, while having publicised a great deal about Australian schools on the “My School” web site. This web site has now been joined by the “My University” web site, where a variety of performance measures for each institution can be viewed and compared. These Australian web sites have compiled an array of statistics that may previously only have been available from disparate sources if they were available at all.

The availability of this level of comprehensive information underscores the requirement on all institutions at all levels of education provision in Australia to focus carefully on the assurance of quality in every aspect of operations.

In this issue, the first paper by Jane Burdett and Joanna Crossman examines a selection of reports on 14 universities prepared by the Australian Universities’ Quality Agency. These reports related to the second cycle of audits of the universities concerned. In these second cycle audits, the Agency focused on the institution’s response to the first cycle recommendations and commendations as well as on how the institutions were managing their approaches to internationalisation. The authors conclude that the early stages of internationalisation, as represented by the institutions examined in this paper, can be informed by the experiences documented in the Australian Universities’ Quality Agencies’ reports.

The second paper by Leonid Grebennikov and Mahsood Shah, presents a longitudinal study of attrition rates for first year students in an Australian university. The authors report on the outcomes of interviews with students who had left the university before the end of their first year of study. This longitudinal study spans a period of about seven years with five samples drawn in various years over that time. An issue that emerged from the analysis related to the extent to which the student and the university had prepared students for the first year experience. This was found to be a common factor among first year student attrition. This is clearly an important matter in any jurisdiction where increasing participation rates in higher education are being encouraged and pursued.

The third paper in this issue by Finian O’Driscoll also addresses the issue of engagement of first year students in the hospitality sector in an Irish tertiary education institution. The research reported in this paper relates to student satisfaction with their first year experience and it was related, in part, to the publication of a government report stressing education sector. The use of data from the institution’s course satisfaction questionnaire coupled with substantial demographic data enabled detailed analysis of a cohort of students that included Irish, European Union and non-European Union student participants.

The fourth paper by David Stoten examines the deployment of quality assurance in sixth form colleges in England. By selecting a sample of ten sixth form colleges and surveying thirty staff from different levels in each college, the author has assembled a rich and detailed picture of the experiences of staff deploying quality assurance in their own institution. The author finds that there are differences in deployment across the sample, with the largest differences being related to geographic variables with colleges in the North of England and the South of England exhibiting the largest differences.

Mahsood Shah and Chenicheri Sid Nair, in the fifth paper in this issue, outline some of the changes in higher education policy in Australia over about the past decade. This period has witnessed unprecedented turbulence and change, with radical changes in policy in the higher education sector culminating in the current context of “compacts” or agreements between individual institutions and government. This has also been accompanied by government policy that moved away from government controlling the number of students in any discipline or institution to allowing institutions to take as many undergraduate students that they felt that they could provide appropriate standards of service. The paper reports on an earlier development where institutions had linked the student evaluation of teaching to the performance development and review of staff. This development was linked by the author to a previous government initiative, the introduction of a “teaching and learning performance fund” for a period of four or five years. The author reflects on the changes that have resulted from government policy changes and looks ahead to the influence that the recently established Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency is likely to have on the higher education sector in Australia.

The final paper in this issue is by Hairuddin Mohd Ali and Mohammed Musah who examine the relationship between the “quality culture” as perceived by academic staff and the academic staff “work performance”. Data were collected by surveying a cross section of academic staff in a single university in Malaysia. The research reported here found a quality culture construct consisting of nine factors and a workforce performance construct consisting of two factors. The authors recognise that their work is exploratory and that their models require much more rigorous testing before any general conclusions can be drawn about their applicability.

In this issue, we have a paper that addresses internationalisation, a paper that looks at quality assurance in UK sixth form colleges, two papers that address the issue of first year student satisfaction, a paper that reports on one government’s attempt to improve teaching quality and a paper that examines the links between quality culture and workforce performance in a Malaysian institution. The Editorial Team trusts that the readership will find the papers in this issue both interesting and useful in informing their deliberations on quality assurance in their own increasingly complex environment.

John DalrympleEditor