'It's the quality, stupid (and only the quality)', speech NVAO Chairman Karl Dittrich during the 6th European Quality Assurance Forum (EQAF) Quality and Trust: at the heart of what we do, Antwerp, 18 November 2011

Distinguished colleagues,

First of all, I would like to thank Marion Coy for her tour d’horizon of all the different developments and patterns of expectation that today’s higher education institutions are facing. You could become depressed about less, but that was not Marion’s point. Her contribution is proof of the complexity higher education has to deal with and how all these expectations from every section of society – that are in themselves already complex – influence the term ‘quality’, a difficult concept as it is!

In my response – which is obviously in part intended to focus discussion – I will, however, try to provide a reassurance from the perspective of external quality assurance. Is that possible, you may wonder; after all, external quality assurance agencies are often regarded as part of the problem! I am going to show you how I think our two worlds have become interlinked and how this interlinking should be seen as an opportunity!

Greatest contribution

I would like to start by quite simply stating that basically, I am very pleased about all the attention being paid to education and in this case, higher education in particular. Fortunately, increasingly more governments and leading sectors of society are realising that education delivers the greatest contribution to prosperity and welfare. And that contribution will only become greater in the future. This means that despite all the complaining, the sector has been left relatively untouched by spending cuts and that everything possible is being done to prepare the education sector for the future. Some are doing this by radically placing the student at the centre of education policy, others are investing heavily in promoting excellence, and still others are implementing changes to the structure, while a fourth option is to strive for greater diversity and a higher profile. Higher education institutions themselves, students as well as quality assurance agencies are experiencing this and have to respond to these changes. But in itself, this attention is a positive point.

The reverse side of this attention is the pattern of expectation of those who desire a great deal from higher education and are resting their hopes on it. These expectations are sometimes ‘grotesque’ (why doesn’t the Netherlands have a ‘Harvard’?), sometimes they are realistic (why do so few students graduate and why do they take so long to complete their studies?), sometimes they are frightening in their simplicity (we need to strive for ‘excellence’ while providing unlimited and free access for all students) and sometimes they are aimed directly at economic growth (education and research should be linked to key economic focus areas). It is often difficult – and on occasion plainly impossible – to fulfil these expectations, especially when we bear in mind that when employers and politicians identify a problem today they often expect it to be resolved tomorrow – or the day after tomorrow at the latest. But, fortunately, along comes a financial crisis or a problem in another sector that temporarily diverts the attention of politicians and the media.

Achieved learning outcomes

To my way of thinking and acting, the focus is being placed more and more on the quality of education and research. I am not going to define quality but I do regard it as the product of the actions of teachers and students. I consider this product, often defined as ‘achieved learning outcomes’, as the measure of education. It is a measure that is determined by a large number of factors:among these the quality of teachers, the quality of the enrolled students, the amount of funding, the educational approach, and the facilities available. So there is not just a single measure but several. We should be able to explain and give details of this measure, but it must always be seen in context. Quality assurance should therefore in fact be focused on achieved learning outcomes in the context of the national requirements, possibilities and circumstances.

But for me, this entails a very important condition! In all my naivety, romanticism, love for higher education and idealism, I assume a world of education in which teachers and students do their utmost to make the product of their collaboration as good as possible. For teachers this means that they are proud of their craft and that they act as professionals in their field. This means that they have to keep up to date with the developments in their field or in the profession for which they provide training. This also means that education, research, and often professional development must be interlinked to a high degree. This intertwining involves a task for teachers. It also means something for students, namely that they must make a serious effort in their studies and not regard studying as a part-time job alongside their main occupation in, for example, the catering industry. Students should demand challenging education programmes and, as participants in the instructional process, they should make their own, substantial contribution.

Consultation inside and outside

Of course, something else is involved, and that is determining the vision and the ambition of a programme: what level should be achieved, what orientation is to be pursued? And the follow-up question to this: how can we make our promises come true? Neither question can be answered in isolation, but rather require consultation inside and outside the programme itself. And this brings us back to the complexity that Marion Coy described. However, the solution and the answer cannot lie elsewhere than with those who bear the final responsibility, and in the first place that means the teachers.

In the world of higher education the emphasis should thus be placed squarely on the institution, the programme, the teachers and the students, but that means that the responsibility for the performances should be placed there too. And in this way I am making internal quality assurance a key focus area. This is also a logical consequence of the autonomy to which the institutions so fiercely aspire and which has now also been determined to offer the best guarantee for the sound development of the sector.

So, the emphasis is on internal quality assurance, no matter how you define it. Personally I don’t believe that the way in which this quality assurance is designed is the most interesting aspect. In some programmes, business administration programmes for example, a formal system could easily constitute the basis, based on total quality management concepts, with solid evaluations conducted among students, alumni and employers. In my view, in other types of programmes like fine arts and philosophy programmes, this kind of approach is not very useful and more value should be attached to a combination of informal teacher-student-apprentice relationships and a less formalised quality assurance system.

Evidence of the existence of a quality culture

Therefore, what I am also concerned with here is searching for and finding alignment with the dominant culture at an institution and in a programme. In this regard, I am well aware that such cultures are often far from unequivocal! I am thus actually looking for evidence of the existence of a quality culture to which I believe the following principles should apply:

• commitment and professionalism of the staff
• involvement and efforts of the students
• cooperation in a team
• critical attitude towards oneself and the team
• (allowing) examination of the inside from the outside
• openness regarding the quality of the delivered products
• constantly asking the question of whether or not the good things are being done in the best possible way.
  

A quality culture of this kind offers the best guarantee (and in the long term perhaps the only guarantee) that the quality of the education provided will remain as high as possible. Internal quality assurance should be in keeping with this.

Realising and promoting a quality culture

What does this mean for external quality assurance? In fact, nothing more than that external quality assurance should be aimed at realising and promoting a quality culture. This quality culture includes a system of quality assurance, either formal or informal, or a combination of the two. And that system should be the subject of external quality assurance, especially at the institution level. For me, there is only one question that is at the crux of the matter at the programme level: does the programme deliver what it promises at the internationally accepted level for short degrees, bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees and PhDs? This is the real question that every institution and every programme should be interested in. Is this idealistic? Possibly. Is this naive? Probably. Is this the crucial question? Beyond a doubt!

Of course the relevant question now is if we can get out from under the political pressure of limited trust – or a lack of faith – in our higher education institutions? Probably not immediately and this is in part down to us. In the past, institutions have seldom been enthusiastic about external quality assurance. External quality assurance was interference on the part of the government or others; external quality assurance was seen as creating uniformity so that more emphasis was placed on procedural and process-based elements of the education system rather than on its content; external quality assurance was a sign of mistrust that was at odds with the autonomy of the institutions.

Conflicting positions

But external quality assurance itself was not always a model of subtlety. In the most stringent systems, negative assessments resulted in the withdrawal of rights and even the cessation of funding; external quality assurance had little eye for differences in culture and structure; and not infrequently, it turned out that external quality assurance agencies were staffed by typical auditors, so that only the result of the audits counted and not the story behind them!

These conflicting positions of institutions and quality assurance agencies, which were not infrequently voiced in harsh words, led to a lack of trust in the power of external quality assurance. And that in turn, leads to mistrust among politicians.
Of course I realise that a warm embrace among those being assessed and those doing the assessing would have led to accusations of too much caution, a lack of firmness and an old boys’ network. But now that the gun smoke of recent history has cleared, it seems very realistic to me that the principle of a quality culture and its related internal quality assurance system should constitute the basis for external quality assurance. I say this with even more conviction because I believe I have observed that teachers have absolutely no objection to talking about their field with their peers; they discuss what they have done and achieved just as easily as what they want to do and want to achieve. And we should start to make collective use of this openness!

I am aware that today I am speaking from a long-standing North-western European tradition of quality assurance, based on relatively stable higher education systems. Not every system can continue to speak from such a stable situation. It also means that we should have a system that is able to accommodate political intentions. For example, when the accreditation system was introduced in the Netherlands at the programme level, private higher education institutions were subject to assessment for the first time, with the intention of separating the wheat from the chaff. This turned out to be necessary and has led to a significant purification of the private education sector. I can therefore well imagine that in several Eastern European countries that are flooded with private higher education institutions, stringent assessments are made of the level realised by these institutions. I can also imagine that objective external quality assessments can contribute to better information provision for students and the labour market. And I can also accept that striving to stimulate excellent curricula and to set them apart goes hand in hand with stringent external assessment.

Benefit

I am therefore not denying the primacy of politics. We sometimes just have to conform to this primacy. After all, we know that higher education is important and relatively expensive. At the same time we know that the benefits of higher education for society in both economic and socio-cultural terms are great. This justifies the attention paid to education and obliges us - institutions, teachers, students, quality assurance agencies - to show that we understand this attention and that we are taking our responsibility for the best possible quality of that education. We can only cooperate, based on our individual roles and responsibilities, but from a common basis, a basis that involves the autonomy of institutions and professionals, the commitment and professionalism of our teachers, and the involvement and efforts of our students. External quality assurance agencies need to respect this basis and allow the performances of the institutions to be seen. From this respect, based on a centuries-long history of good results, we should continue to convince politicians and society of the need for and the strength of our institutions.

So, my message is actually quite simple. What is involved here is quality culture. If there is such a culture, if it is valued and defended, education and research will flourish. And external quality assurance? It cares!

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