With this text, I want to briefly tell you about what happened at the NU conference 2020 and why we must not be fooled by the mindset that quality systems are responsible for the quality of education within the university. This is a slightly longer text but well sums up some of SFS's reasoning about the way forward when it comes to creating better quality of education in Swedish higher education.
SFS at the NU conference 2020
Last week, the NU conference was held, which every two years brings together many from the higher education sector to discuss current topics in higher education pedagogy. This year the focus was on "Sustainable learning" in response to what is happening in our world when it comes to sustainable development. I participated in two sessions, a panel debate with i.a. Minister of Higher Education and Research Matilda Ernkrans (see picture below) and a "Fishbowl" session with UKÄ.
At the panel debate, I presented what we recently decided on at ExtraSFSFUM concerning precisely University Pedagogy with a focus on doctoral students' pedagogical knowledge, merit system and UKÄ's report. The issue of student influence in practice and perspectives on the role of students in society was also raised. Unfortunately, I did not manage to lift my central message strongly enough this time - Quality is not created in quality systems.
It was different the next day where I, Anders Söderholm (DG UKÄ), Andrea Amft (UKÄ), Lena Dafgård (ITHU) and Fredrika Lagergren Wahlin (GU and chairman of SUHF expert group for digitization) participated in a "fishbowl" exercise. Different participants could then jump into the conversation with us and ask questions - a lot of focus ended up on how we achieve a control for more higher education pedagogical development. Here, my message was clearer: in the multitude of all higher education pedagogical issues, we must dare to focus on our investigations, as a sector we should at least support UKÄ's proposals. And the main thesis of this text - Quality is not created in quality systems.
The quality system
I have been involved in the development of the national quality assurance system since 2015 when I got my first involvement in SFS - member of SFS expert group for higher education evaluation (what is now SQC). At that time there was a university chancellor and her name was Harriet Wallberg. We were just starting out with what the new system would look like and lots of thoughts about pitfalls and theoretical outcomes were constantly discussed. Since then, I have participated in UKÄ's reference group for system development, SUHF's expert group for quality issues and had countless discussions with the quality system with all kinds of parties. Since 2015, things have really changed. There is no longer a university chancellor, the system has been run in sharp mode and soon Sweden may regain its membership in ENQA. There is absolute potential for improvement in the system and here I, together with SQC and others in the student movement, will be particularly committed this year to the system's development before the next cycle. However, the system has in fact been shown to create results through a great deal of quality work at the higher education institutions, conducted thematic evaluations, educational evaluations that led to revoked degree permits and degree permit examinations with both positive and negative outcomes.
But I want to focus here on the principle of the relationship between "quality" system and the concept of "educational quality". Sometimes when we at SFS meet those in power, some high-ranking with significant influence at the university, and mention that it is important with, for example, good financial conditions and support for higher education pedagogical development to create better quality, we meet. ”But do we have a quality assurance system? If it works, the higher education is of high quality and it must also do so by law."
I understand why this mindset can arise but will now argue about why it is incredibly dangerous.
Quality of education
Education quality can be said to be many things and is based on the perspectives of different actors, but SFS's quality committee SQC has boiled it down to something like:
The student's prerequisites for learning useful skills, abilities and knowledge
The definition of educational quality according to SFS Quality Committee, SQC
The key concepts here are the student's prerequisites, learning and usability. Quality of education is what is created when teachers in one way or another interact with students and provide opportunities to learn things that are useful to the student. To achieve this, there are an incredible number of things that can be done such as hiring teachers, strengthening their skills and conditions, controlling what is taught, creating research connections, taking in employers' perspectives, ensuring a connection between learning objectives, learning activities and examination, having student funding systems and so on. Among these is to have a system that ensures that educations maintain a certain minimum quality level (quality assurance) and contributes to improving quality (quality development). But this system can do no more than start from the conditions that education providers receive, above all in the form of the amount of resources and how these are allocated. A conceptual way of looking at it is according to the model below:
But what does this conceptual way of thinking mean in practice?
The productivity deduction
Every year, a number of percent of higher education resources are taken away in what is called the "productivity deduction". This is done practically by not adjusting appropriations at the same rate as costs increase. As an example, the productivity deduction for 2021 is proposed to be 1,47%, which means that if the costs due to inflation increase by e.g. 2%, the higher education institutions' funding will only increase by 0,53%. 1,47% for higher education's approximately SEK 30 billion corresponds to around SEK 440 million. This system has been running for about 25 years and for those who want to see the development since then, I recommend SULF's report System error in the knowledge factory. Teacher education is worst affected and receives about half as much money now per student compared to 25 years ago - one can wonder if the quality problems that are often pointed out have to do with this.
But why is there a productivity deduction? Officially, it is to create incentives to become more "efficient", ie. do the same business for less money or more business for the same money. Unofficially and practically, it mainly fulfills two purposes, partly to enable relocations between and within areas of expenditure without making politicians look bad and partly to create "investments" that make politicians look good. There is also an argument that the public sector must be as efficient as the private service sector in order for public sector wages to keep up, but the argument is hampered by other factors.
Much can be said about the productivity deduction and its effects, but how does it relate to the national quality assurance system and higher education pedagogical development? By introducing a national quality assurance system and placing the responsibility for ensuring that educations are of high quality, we risk slowly lowering our standards and definitions for what is considered to be precisely high quality. The national quality assurance system is based almost entirely, in practice, on the higher education institutions' own conditions. This is in a way good because different universities should be assessed differently depending on what conditions they have. But it also creates a risk that an education can be considered "high quality" because it does not stand out from other educations; the university may spend the money they receive and do everything they can to maintain high quality and that must be considered sufficient somewhere.
The alternative is that we set a high bar for the universities' activities and individual educations with the risk that educations will be closed down to a greater degree than today. But if the conditions do not improve, that is, the resources continue to decrease, what does this really serve over time? And how many municipalities had accepted that their teacher education be closed down due to arbitrary definitions of what is considered to be education quality? The purpose of the quality system in this regard should be to identify which educations are not well taken care of and either improve or shut them down so that its resources can be better allocated elsewhere. But the system cannot possibly have the purpose of creating quality from teachers who do not exist.
The way forward and international examples
A possible solution to all this would be to remove or even reverse the productivity deduction. Every year, more resources are actually added to research - why can the same not be true for education? This is the line of influence that has been pursued for more than 20 years and has worked to some extent, the deduction for higher education is lower than for other sectors and there is more flexibility in the university's financial system than others. But still the productivity deduction remains and there is no indication that it would be removed in the near future. As an economist from one of our now budget-negotiating parties told me "It is part of the functioning of the entire state budget".
Another alternative is that we try to adopt the official purpose of the productivity deduction - a real increase in efficiency. How can you achieve better education quality without more resources within the university? Through better teachers. How to create better teachers? Because we employ right from the start and have constant higher education pedagogical development and dialogue with students.
This is not a wildly exciting theoretical idea but is well applied in other countries, such as Great Britain. As a disclaimer, Britain is currently doing a lot of wrong but has a strong foundation to stand on. In the United Kingdom, the higher education institutions have lower overall educational income per student, but still manage to maintain high-quality education to a much stronger degree than we do in Sweden. How? Through clear initiatives and support for those who actually create quality education: teachers and students.
Some good examples of these support structures are:
- Advance HE (formerly Higher education academy) which aims to strengthen teachers and university leaders
- SEDA which, among other things, aims to create equality and mobility among higher education teachers - a major problem in Swedish higher education
- JISC which aims to support teachers and teaching teams with digital higher education pedagogical development - think how practical this would have been now that we may have to have hybrid or distance education for several more months
- National student survey, NSS, which allows students to give an honest picture of their education that is of great importance to the image and resources of higher education institutions
- Significant resources for research in higher education and higher education pedagogy
- TSEP, which actively works with the development of student influence throughout the UK and is housed by the equivalent of SFS, NUS
- RAISE, a network for teachers and students to improve student influence
- SPAR QS, an organization on the order of UKÄ whose purpose is to support local student unions to pursue an active and professional student influence towards higher education institutions and teachers in Scotland for increased quality of education. A fantastic example.
I do not claim that it is possible to just take these examples straight off and introduce them in Sweden, but we have no equivalent equivalents to the organizations and structures above. The cost of introducing these structures and organizations would be relatively small compared to how much the higher education sector costs. If we were to choose to spend around 440 million on these annually, it would really have started quality development!
As it looks right now, Swedish higher education has the lowest number of teacher-led hours of all countries in Europe, we lack significant support structures for students and teachers, every year the resources for research increase and decrease for education while it is not possible to balance these and we has a resource system that lowers the requirements for our educations, which leads to reduced higher education pedagogical support for students. Those who lose out on this are ultimately Sweden and future generations. Companies wonder why new graduates do not have professional abilities, teacher students testify to about 30 degree goals in an education with a maximum of 4 teacher-led hours a week and Sweden loses both competitiveness and education.
To say in this situation "but we have a quality assurance system that is responsible for all educational qualityIs among the most provocative there is. This implies that we can lean back while the university continues to erode and the educations become increasingly lower quality and then blame this system when it is discovered that the quality of education does not measure up. It is unworthy of a welfare state like Sweden.
In summary
Quality is not created in quality systems, it is created in the meeting between teacher and student. Even if the quality system fulfills an important purpose, it can never replace the basic preconditions that must exist to achieve true quality development. Letting the productivity deduction continue to gnaw and then blame quality systems is unworthy. We can get better in Sweden and still have a productivity deduction, but then it is important that we focus on what actually matters.
Invest in higher education pedagogy, invest in student influence, invest in the future.