institutional audit who runs it? what is it and how often does it occur? how will it affect us? what...
TRANSCRIPT
Institutional Audit
• Who runs it?
• What is it and how often does it occur?
• How will it affect us?
• What do we need to do?
• What will the outcome be and does it matter?
Institutional Audit - who runs it?
• Audit is carried out by the QAA - Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education
• HEFCE - the Higher Education Funding Council for England - delegates to QAA its statutory responsibility to assure the quality of education provided for students in HE
• The QAA is funded 50:50 by UK funding councils and subscriptions from universities
Institutional Audit - what is it? (1)
• It is an educational, not a financial audit• The new system combines university-level with
subject-level review - the old Subject Review system no longer exists - and takes place every 6 years
• Bristol is one of the first universities to be audited under the new system
• A team of 5 or 6 external academic staff will visit us for a week
• The purpose of the visit is for the team to verify the quality and standards of our education by meeting groups of staff and students and reading documents
Institutional Audit - what is it? (2)
• In advance, the team will identify university-level ‘themes’ they wish to pursue, such as:– external examining procedures
– programme approval and review
– staff review and development
• The team will also select 5 ‘discipline trails’ to enable them to look in detail at a few subjects and to explore the extent to which institutional policy and practices are adopted at subject level
Institutional Audit - what is it ? (3)
• We provide an institutional ‘self-evaluation’ of our management of learning and teaching activities (30-40 pages)
• This will include analytical comment on:– institutional context (size, style, etc)
– developments since last audit (1993)
– action arising from previous subject reviews
– key features, strengths and limitations of internal quality assurance processes (e.g. Faculty Quality Assurance Teams)
– strategies for improving quality and standards
Institutional Audit - what is it? (4)
• We provide a ‘self-evaluation’ for each of the five discipline trails (3,000 words)
• These will comment on:– educational aims of programmes
– student learning outcomes
– curriculum and assessment of students
– quality of learning opportunities
– how standards and quality are maintained/enhanced
• programme specifications will be attached to each self-evaluation
Institutional Audit - how will it affect us?
• Potentially the audit could have little effect on many academic staff
• But, subjects chosen as discipline audit trails will have a short visit during the audit
• We will know in advance what the five discipline trails will be
• Some subjects are already drafting self-evaluations, based on our informed guess about which discipline trails will be chosen
Institutional Audit - what do we need to do?
• For subjects chosen as discipline trails, we need to:– finalize the self-evaluations– select some staff who will meet the audit team,
guided by their requirements– collect a small amount of documents to enable
the team to decide whether quality and academic standards are being maintained in the relevant subjects
Institutional Audit - what will the outcome be and does it matter? (1)
• The audit will result in a published report
• There are two overall categories of judgement but NO numerical scores
• The first judgement concerns the team’s confidence in the university’s management of quality and academic standards:
– broad confidence
– limited confidence
– no confidence
Institutional Audit - what will the outcome be and does it matter? (2)
• The second judgement is about the reliability and accuracy of the information the University publishes about itself
• Overall judgements are supported by specific recommendations for action, each categorised as:– essential
– advisable or
– desirable
• The University will be aiming for a judgement of broad confidence, with few or no essential recommendations
Institutional Audit - what will the outcome be and does it matter? (3)
• If we have a positive report, we will receive less attention from the QAA in subsequent years, as long as we take action where advised
• The audit offers an opportunity for the University to put the record straight in areas where it has previously been criticised (Subject Review reports and other)
• In the new HE environment, external validation and benchmarking are important in assessing institutional quality - published reports are widely available and have a high profile
Useful web addresses
• To view the QAA Handbook for institutional audit: England, go to:
www.qaa.ac.uk/public/inst_audit_hbook/
institutional_audit.htm
• To see notes of guidance on discipline audit trails, go to:
www.bris.ac.uk/tsu/ext_quality/qaa/
guidedisptrail.doc