Today the results were released by UKÄ's educational evaluation of subject teacher education44 of the country's 103 subject teacher training programs were rated 'questionable quality'. But what does that mean and what impact will it have?
About a year ago, we at SFS emphasized the importance of responsible politicians and universities in response to the upcoming release of the corresponding evaluation of preschool and primary school teacher training through a blog postWhile our opinions from that post remain, the entire sector and the quality system have now come a long way in their development. For someone who has been involved in developing the new system since its creation, it is incredibly gratifying that we are now starting to see the fruits of our work as the system is fully operational.
The quality assurance system consists of four parts: higher education institution reviews (LSG), educational evaluations (UU), degree authorization tests (ETP) and thematic evaluations (TU). Conceptually, LSG and TU should develop, ETP should strictly control and UU should do both. The balance between development and control in a quality assurance system is important and this system allows for fine-tuning of this in an excellent way. But the fact that UU fulfills both roles makes it a bit special; we now have a coherent document of 2848 pages which accounts for the entire review. It is approximately 27 pages per course. The document is certainly extremely useful for those who provide the courses, for development, but is more difficult to digest for decision-makers and opinion formers, for control. UKÄ has tried to summarize the conclusions through an introductory chapter in the long document, a summary press release and an overview image about how the evaluations turned out per higher education institution.
So what do the evaluations show? Some points I took away are the following:
- More teachers are needed for teachers. The research connection must be strengthened and this will most likely require an increased number of teachers with a doctorate. More doctoral students are simply needed and I remember this being something that the former Minister of Higher Education and Research Helene Hellmark Knutsson pointed out when she was asked about the challenges of teacher education.
- The training courses must become more useful and increasingly support students' readiness to face changes in working life.
- It is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to measure all graduation goals.
- Workplace-based training (VFU) must be strengthened in several ways.
There are certainly more conclusions to draw and even more proposed solutions. We at SFS have now begun a collaboration with the Swedish Teachers' Union Student Association and the Swedish Teachers' Union Student Association to try to get a common view of teacher education and its challenges.
Some parties and organizations have pointed out the importance of concentrating teacher training courses in fewer universities in order to increase quality in this way. Others, of course, believe that this counteracts the ambition that 'the whole country should live'. To all of these, we say to take it easy, because this is cleverly already built into the system! All programs whose quality has now been questioned have one year to submit an action plan unless they choose to close the program now (something we know has happened at previous UUs). This action plan will then be reviewed and assessed by another group of assessors. If the program does not meet the requirements, the university's degree permit will be withdrawn and the program will de facto be closed.
This entire process for these educational evaluations can, in my opinion, be expected to be completed around the fall of 2021. Is that a long time for a process that began in the fall of 2018? On the one hand, yes - how long should these evaluations really take? On the other hand, no, a student does not even have time to complete their education before it is closed. Three years is not that long in the higher education world. However, we believe that this process can and should be faster and that this is a natural part of developing the system. I know that equivalent evaluations in other countries can take about 6 months, but they have also developed their systems for more than 25 years, while in Sweden we have been moving on ours thanks to "firm" politicians.
It is important that we let the system run its course so that we can develop it. We already have some concrete points we would like to see, at least for the next cycle, regarding the educational evaluations:
- Create more clarity by making visible which assessment areas, and if possible assessment grounds, led to questionable quality
- Speed up the entire process of educational evaluations, from initiation to revoked degree permit
- Focus more on educational evaluations on a case-by-case basis next cycle. As it is now, it is decided several years in advance which educational programs are to be evaluated. We believe this can serve an important purpose, but it is slow, time-consuming, blunt and risks being over-simplified. The system could become much more efficient and quality-driven if the choice of which educational programs are evaluated were instead chosen in a more dynamic way.
- Clarify the relationship between the different components of the system. How do the outcomes of the higher education institution reviews affect which educational evaluations are made? Can educational evaluations be made depending on what happened in the degree permit review? What role do thematic evaluations actually play for educational evaluations? And so on. We believe there is a lot of potential here but that there is a good foundation to stand on.
Something I really want to emphasize about this system is that the concepts of 'high quality' and 'questionable quality' are important and that the latter is not the same as 'low quality'. In Sweden, according to the Higher Education Act, it is illegal to provide education of anything other than high quality. This may seem a bit strange but it serves an important function in the legal framework for higher education. Law and concepts aside, I do not want students who study a program that is rated 'questionable quality' to feel that they are taking a "bad education" because these are different things. As an example, I would probably give my own program 'questionable quality' every day of the week because I know that so much can be improved, but I still believe that it is an excellent program in comparison with other programs, based on my expectations and the expectations of future employers. This problem is therefore based on the fact that the program evaluations serve both the purpose of development and control.
If we let this system develop and roll over several years, we will eventually reach the point where if an education is provided, it is more or less guaranteed to be of de facto high quality. Until then, a communicative challenge remains where we all need to help each other understand and clarify what these concepts actually mean.
To politicians We now appeal not to draw hasty conclusions and come up with simple solutions. Let closures take place within the framework of the system we have now jointly decided on and are developing. Let's not pump teacher education with even more degree objectives, as it is already almost impossible to train in all subjects and even more difficult to follow up on this. No other education has so many degree objectives and the entire system is being questioned because of what has happened to teacher education. Let the application pressure and admission requirements increase, but only for the right reasons. And for God's sake, give teacher education the right conditions if you want it to function well!
Teacher training has the most eroded price tag of all (System error in the knowledge factory, SULF 2018) which leads to fewer teacher educators and poorer quality. Teacher education suffers because universities are not given the opportunity to allocate research funds to hire doctoral students who in turn would lead to more teachers with doctorates. Universities are forced to lower examination requirements due to the toxic spirit that is the performance-based resource allocation system in combination with low application pressure, which leads to a vicious spiral of decreasing quality and status. Fortunately, there is already an inquiry that has made proposals for this and I need say no more than that implement STRUT and stop the erosion!
Finally, I just want to thank UKÄ for their fantastic work and look forward to continuing to develop the system with them and the rest of the higher education sector.