Today the result was released UKÄ's educational evaluation of the subject teacher education. 44 of the country's 103 subject teacher educations were assessed as 'questioned quality'. But what does it mean and what impact will it have?
About a year ago, we at SFS emphasized the importance of responsible politicians and higher education institutions in response to the forthcoming release of the corresponding evaluation of pre-school and primary school teacher education through a blog post. While our views from that post remain, the entire sector and quality system has now come further in its development. For someone who has been involved in developing the new system since its creation, it is incredibly fun that we are now beginning to be able to see the fruits of our work when the system is in full swing.
The quality assurance system consists of four parts: university reviews (LSG), educational evaluations (UU), degree permit examinations (ETP) and thematic evaluations (TU). Conceptually, LSG and TU will develop, ETP will closely control and UU will do both. The balance between development and control in a quality assurance system is important and this system enables a fine-tuning of this in an excellent way. But the fact that UU fills both roles makes it a bit special; we have now a cohesive document of 2848 pages which accounts for the entire review. That's about 27 pages per course. The document is certainly extremely useful for those who provide the training, for development, but is more difficult to digest for decision-makers and opinion leaders, 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 university.
So what do the evaluations show? Some points I took with me are the following:
- More teachers are needed for the teachers. The research connection must be strengthened and this will most likely require an increased number of PhD teachers. More doctoral students are simply needed and I remember this is 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 educations must become more useful and increasingly support the students' readiness to face changes in working life.
- It is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to measure all degree objectives.
- Work-based education (VFU) must be strengthened in several ways.
There are certainly more conclusions to be drawn and even more solutions. We at SFS have now started a collaboration with the Swedish Teachers 'Association student and the National Teachers' Association student association to try to get a common view of teacher education and its challenges.
Some parties and organizations have emphasized the importance of concentrating teacher education on fewer higher education institutions in order to increase quality. Others, of course, believe that this runs counter to the ambition that 'the whole country should live'. To all of these we say to take it easy, because this is cleverly enough already built into the system! All educations that have now had their quality questioned have one year to submit an action plan if they do not choose to discontinue the education already now (something we know has happened at previous UUs). This action plan will then be reviewed and assessed by another assessment group. If the education does not meet the requirements set, the university's degree permit will be revoked and de facto the education will then be discontinued.
This whole process for these educational evaluations can, in my opinion, be expected to be completed around the autumn of 2021. Is it a long time for a process that began in the autumn of 2018? On the one hand, yes - how long will these evaluations really have to take? On the other hand, no, a student does not even have time to complete his education before it is closed. Three years is not that long in the university world. However, we believe that this process can and should be faster and that this is a natural part of developing the system. Corresponding evaluations in other countries I know can take about 6 months but they have also developed their systems for more than 25 years while we in Sweden have shaken ours thanks to "solid" politicians.
It is important that we let the system roll on so we can develop it. We already have some concrete points we would like to see, at least for the next cycle, concerning the educational evaluations:
- Create more clarity by highlighting which assessment areas, and if possible assessment criteria, led to the quality in question
- Speed up the entire process for educational evaluations, from initiation to revoked degree approval
- Focus more on educational evaluations of the reason for the next cycle. As it is now, it is decided several years in advance which educations are to be evaluated. We believe this can fulfill an important purpose, but it is slow, time-consuming, blunt and risks beautification. The system can become much more efficient and quality-driven if the choice of which educations are evaluated is instead chosen in a more dynamic way.
- Clarifies the relationship between the various components of the system. How do the results of the university examinations affect which educational evaluations are made? Can educational evaluations take place depending on what happened in the degree permit examination? What role do thematic evaluations really play in 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 point out with this system is that the concepts of 'high quality' and 'questioned 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 conduct education of anything other than high quality. This may seem a little strange but fulfills an important function in the legal framework for the university. Law and concepts aside, I do not want students who study in an education that is judged 'questioned quality' to feel that they are doing a "bad education" because there are different things. As an example, I would probably give my own education 'questionable quality' every day of the week because I know that so much can be improved but I still think it is an excellent education compared to other educations, based on my expectations and expectations from future employers . This problem is thus based on the fact that the educational evaluations fulfill both the purpose of developing and controlling.
If we let this system develop and roll over several years, we will eventually reach the point that if an education is given, it is more or less guaranteed that it is de facto of high quality. Until then, a communicative challenge remains where we all need to be helped to 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 developed. Do not pump up teacher education with even more degree goals as it is already today almost impossible to educate in everyone and even more difficult to follow this up. No other education has so many degree objectives and the whole system is questioned because of what has happened with teacher education. Let the search pressure and admission requirements increase but only for the right reasons. And for God's sake, give the teacher education the right conditions if you want it to work in a good way!
Teacher education has the most eroded price tag of all (System error in the knowledge factory, SULF 2018) which leads to fewer teacher teachers and poorer quality. Teacher education suffers because the higher education institutions are not given the opportunity to allocate research funds to employ doctoral students, which in turn would lead to more PhD teachers. The higher education institutions are forced to lower the examination requirements due to the poison grog, which is the performance-based resource allocation system in combination with low application pressure, which leads to a vicious spiral of declining quality and status. Handy enough, there is already an inquiry that has made suggestions on this and I need say no more than that implement STRUT and stop the erosion!
Finally, I just want to thank UKÄ for a fantastic job and look forward to continuing to develop the system with them and the rest of the higher education sector.