Paul Temple

Higher Education Quality Assurance Organisations in Central and Eastern Europe.

This paper considers the development of intermediary, or buffer, bodies dealing with quality assurance in higher education in Central and Eastern Europe over the past 10 years. It relates these developments to the context of communist-era centralisation and control, and to more recent interventions by international aid agencies. The lessons that such agencies appear to draw from the Western experience of intermediary bodies in higher education are critically examined. Hypotheses intended to explain the development of different approaches to quality assurance in the region are examined, but none are found to be robust. The paper argues that control, rather than quality enhancement, is the dominating concern of the quality assurance agencies throughout the region. It is further argued that it is important for these agencies to adopt more flexible notions of quality related to institutional goals.

University branding: What can it do?

Tyler Brûlé makes his living largely from advising companies, and apparently countries, about branding matters, so it’s perhaps not surprising that he sees the series of disasters that overtook Japan in March 2011 in terms of branding. And, to be fair, when most foreigners were rushing to escape from Tokyo as news from the Fukushima power plant went from bad to worse, Brûlé apparently had a seat in a nearempty plane going in the opposite direction. Even so, seeing a re-thinking of Japan’s branding as the silver lining is fairly breathtaking. In a previous paper in perspectives (Temple 2006) I argued that much branding activity in higher education is misconceived, because (as far as I could tell) it fails to understand what it is that universities do and how they do it. As I concluded then, The brands of . . . universities, that is, people’s perceptions of the kind of places they are, come out of . . . academic and organisational successes and failures. Building a brand, if you want to call it that, means working to ensure there are more successes than failures – and it can only be done by the academic and administrative staff working together, with good leadership. Nobody else can do it. That is the reality: branding, as a route to success, is the illusion.

What Has the Coalition Government Done for Higher Education

Higher education in England has changed between 2010 and 2015 to a greater extent than in any other comparable time period – and as a direct result of the policies of the Coalition Government formed in May 2010. The move to a mass higher education system in Britain, for example – from around 1m students to 2.5m – took around twenty-five years starting in the mid-1980s. But even this fundamental change in scale was arguably ‘more of the same’, with the main modalities of the higher education system remaining largely unaltered: the system in 2010 would have appeared largely familiar to a visitor from a 1980s university. As with most areas of public policy, continuities in higher education policy can be identified along with changes: so, the Labour Government introduced tuition fees in 1998, followed by a new loan-based fee regime in 2006. These developments clearly provided a framework within which the 2012 fee regime could fit: however, the earlier changes seem, in retrospect, to be fairly modest developments. When considering research policy, the concentration of publicly funded research into fewer and fewer institutions began with the 1986 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and carried on fairly steadily through the intervening years, though since 2010 the dominance of the London– Oxford–Cambridge ‘golden triangle’ has been confirmed with the implementation of the 2014 successor to the RAE, the Research Excellence Framework. In contrast to this historical pattern of stability or gradual change, during the 2010–15 period the English higher education landscape has changed profoundly, in a number of ways. But underlying these changes has been an ideology resting on faith in the beneficent results of market-based methods. The basis for these changes is to be found in the 2011 White Paper, Higher Education: Students at the heart of the system (Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills (BIS) 2011) – one of the Coalition Government’s early policy statements. The White Paper’s single most notable policy – certainly its most eye-catching one – was the introduction of a new ‘graduate contribution scheme’ with loans of up to £9,000 being available to meet tuition fees, and with a compensating reduction in the block grants for teaching paid to universities by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. (Different arrangements would apply to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.) These changes followed a review of university finance led by Lord Browne, established under the previous government, but did not precisely follow what Browne recommended (Browne, 2010). Most independent commentators consider that these arrangements, for a number of reasons, have not produced and will not produce significant savings for the public finances (though the uncertainties involved in making long-term estimates are large), although they do not seem to

Space, place and institutional effectiveness in higher education

ABSTRACT The possible connections between the physical form of a higher education institution and its effectiveness as a site for teaching, learning, scholarship and research have only become explicit, to some extent, from the mid-twentieth century. This may be thought surprising, not least in view of the large proportion of most institutional budgets devoted to creating and maintaining physical fabric. This lack of consideration is now being rectified from both theoretical and operational perspectives. Space and place – the latter conceptualised here as what people make of space – in higher education have come under examination in recent years from philosophical, sociological, pedagogic, architectural, and other perspectives. The conceptual breadth of these perspectives makes it difficult to analyse or to theorise convincingly in a general sense about physical space in higher education – to a greater extent, arguably, than for other overarching determinants of higher education outcomes. I present here some conclusions drawing on current understandings of the meanings of space and place in higher education; how they are seen as interacting (or not) with academic work; and what directions further work in this area might usefully take.