Adrian Webb

The introduction of university staff appraisal

Universities have had to respond to the Governments requirement for greater accountability and efficiency in the use of public resources. This has resulted in a movement to more commercial, or executive styles of management, and with this the introduction of systematic staff appraisal. Funded by the Department of Education and Science (DES), the authors are conducting an evaluation of university staff appraisal schemes as they begin to operate.

The function of performance appraisal in UK universities

This study mapped the development of performance appraisal in UK universities and assessed the initial impact of appraisal in four case study institutions. University staff felt that appraisal has had little impact on their motivation, efficiency and performance. One reason for this may be the ambiguity surrounding the intentions of staff appraisal in universities: it is neither a management tool, nor is it wholly focused on staff development. If appraisal is primarily concerned with assessment, it must be linked to promotion and merit pay awards. The current arrangement of using agreed summaries from the appraisal interviews in promotion procedures is not entirely satisfactory and requires further consideration. If, on the other hand, appraisal is intended for the purposes of staff development, this aim should be explicity stated and backed up with adequate resources and effective procedures designed to ensure that identified training needs are met.While universities have responded to the need to develop appraisal schemes there is very little sense in which appraisal has been given a coherent function in relation to other aspects of management. If appraisal is to promote change in universities, it must be incorporated in university and departmental planning.

Voluntary Social Action: in Search of a Policy?

a sufficient, necessary, or unambiguously desirable way of responding to social problems. The parallel event is a regeneration of interest in the extent, nature, limits and role of non-statutory forms of social service provision and social care. This level of interest has been reflected in the work and conclusions of several major committees of enquiry, as well as in an increased flow of academic research and writing. This essay is confined, almost exclusively, to an examination of four reports arising from the committees of enquiry. In chronological order of publication, they are: Seebohm, 1968; Aves, 1969; Goodman, 1969; and Wolfenden, 1978. The first was an official government sponsored committee of enquiry concerned primarily with statutory services and only tangentially with non-statutory social provision, while the others were all nongovernmental committees funded by private foundations to study particular aspects of the role of voluntary action in social policy. Each of them concentrated on what are now called the personal social services The term voluntary social action is used in this essay to refer to the entire field of activity of voluntary organizations and organised volunteer work. Its only validity is that it enables us to distinguish analytically between the work of paid employees of statutory agencies on the one hand and the purely informal help provided by family, friends and neighbours on the other. These distinctions are difficult