Editorial

The articles in this issue of Quality in Higher Education address a wide range of challenges facing higher education today. In particular, they focus on philosophical conundrums about quality in higher education. This is perhaps apt in the light of Harvey’s (2004–17) recent revisions to the Annotated Quality Glossary. In this immensely useful resource, Harvey brings together a huge range of work on different aspects of quality in the sector but it highlights not only the huge amount of work that has been done in the field of quality in higher education: it shows the tendency of researchers to hold firmly to well-established definitions such as that of Harvey and Green (1993). Such definitions are an important part of the discourse on quality in higher education but it is also important to build on these and move the discussion onwards.

Tensions between accountability and improvement have long been a core concern of the debate on quality. In their article, Peodair Leihy and José Miguel Salazar critique commonly accepted perceptions of accountability in higher education. They argue that accountability structures are at best prompts for action but what is vital is that actors in higher education are reflexive practitioners.

The notion that higher education is a market has become well established but the full implications of this have seldom been explored. In their article on the Danish sector, Carsten Bendixen and Jens Christian Jacobsen explore the implications of viewing higher education as a market. They argue that quality in higher education is often equated in quality assurance reports to graduate employability and as such is detrimental to higher education as an intellectual activity.

There has long been a debate about the identity, role and perceptions of stakeholders in quality assurance. In their study of the Finnish sector, Anu Lyytinen, Vuokko Kohtamäki, Jussi Kivistö, Elias Pekkola and Seppo Hölttä found that an essential challenge for Finnish higher education institutions is to develop flexible quality assurance practices capable of balancing the academic goals of the institutions and the needs of the external stakeholders. The authors argue that this requires seeking balance between the centralised coordination and the differentiated practices of disciplines and academic units inside institutions.

The stakeholder that has become the most prominent in recent years is the student and the so-called ‘student voice’ is most commonly heard though the use of student experience surveys. There has, however, been relatively little work that critically evaluates the use of such surveys, especially in different national and cultural contexts. Claire Hamshire, Rachel Forsyth, Amani Bell, Matthew Benton, Roisin Kelly-Laubscher, Moragh Paxton and Ema Wolfgramm-Foliaki draw on findings from four narrative inquiry studies, carried out in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, to illustrate how a narrative approach could be used to complement performance indicators.

Despite the focus on the quality of teaching, little work has been done on how lecturers are prepared for teaching. Don Houston and Cassandra Hood explore the impact of one initial teaching preparation programme to add to the body of evidence on the efficacy of such programmes. Their findings indicate that such programmes have beneficial effects on individual academics, on wider work groups and have value to the institution. However, they argue that the transfer of learning by academics to practice takes time and is mediated by many factors. Nevertheless, where institutional and local departmental cultures value teaching, teaching preparation programmes provide a useful strategy for quality enhancement in higher education.

James Williams
School of Social Sciences, Birmingham City University, UK
[email protected]