Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

Institutions, academics & assessment of prior experiential learning

Norman Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134552542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

The Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (ILT) was launched in 1999 as a result of the recommendations of the Dearing committee. It is the only national body in the world which promotes the quality of teaching and learning in higher education.

This book has four purposes:
* to provide the background story to the evolution and establishment of the ILT
* to document the central role of the assessment of prior learning (APL)
* to support the institutions and individuals who are moving to engage with the ILT and in particular take the APL route for the first time
* to speculate on the possible consequences of the ILT itself and APL within it.

The ILT is a professional membership organisation which is open to all institutions and academics. This book will be of interest to all those who teach and support learning in higher education.

1 Beginnings

The assessment of prior experiential learning (AP(E)L) is one of the fascinations of the story about the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (ILT) in Britain. Both the Institute itself and AP(E)L in its context are unique in the world.

Amidst all the discussions worldwide, about the quality of learning and teaching in higher education, Great Britain stands alone in inventing a national body to promote that quality. Its underlying purpose is to improve students’ learning, foster self-directed learning and enable staff themselves to follow a route to be recommended to their own students. Not that it is a legal requirement (yet) for universities and colleges to have anything to do with this new body, but the pressures are there from government for all institutions to make arrangements for their academics to become members of the new body, and to persuade, cajole, maybe require them to secure membership of what has been established in April 1999 as the Institute of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (also abbreviated as the ILT). It is unique.

It is also unique in a worldwide context in including in its provision the assessment of prior and experiential learning (AP(E)L). That means it becomes an institutional mainstream activity for academic staff themselves. As the story unfolds it will be seen that backed by this new academic body, AP(E)L can become a facility available to academics in all universities and colleges irrespective of their standing and whether or not AP(E)L services are available for students. That seems incredible when its implications are thought through; AP(E)L for academics whether or not they engage in it with their students.

It is also vital throughout this story to hold in mind that the Institute is there to serve learning support staff as well as fully fledged academics. That means that librarians, information technology staff, laboratory assistants, part-time staff, postgraduate students who also teach, all could seek membership provided that their contributions to the academic work of the Institution merited it. AP(E)L could well be vital for many of them in seeking membership.

It was the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education’s (NCIHE) Report in July 1997 which recommended the establishment of an Institute of Learning and Teaching.

Recommendation 13 reads:

We recommend that institutions of higher education begin immediately to develop or seek access to programmes of teacher training for their staff if they do not have them, and that all institutions seek national accreditation of such programmes from the Institute of Learning and Teaching for Higher Education.

(ILT)

Recommendation 14 introduced an essential condition. It was for representative bodies in consultation with the Funding Councils to establish the ILT. This recommendation was a vital caveat. It was smoothing the way for acceptance of the recommendation by higher education. As such it was in line with the long-standing device of government employing what can be claimed as a hands-off approach to something it wanted to achieve. As a membership organisation higher education institutions themselves would own the ILT, through their academics memberships, while government retained its influence through the Funding Councils having a seat on its board as of right. Money talks!

The NCIHE’s reasoning for the recommendations were given in paragraph 8.76. It was to:

raise the status of teaching across higher education, help the UK to become world leader in the practice of teaching at higher levels, and emphasise the importance of learning. This should be a national objective to enable the UK to compete effectively in the next century in a world where the quality, relevance and effectiveness of education and training systems will underpin future prosperity.

The Committee of Inquiry itself was established by the Tory government, true in close consultation with the Labour Opposition, but essentially to try to find an answer to the vexed question of how best to fund the higher education system. At that time there was general agreement that it was being endangered. It had succeeded almost beyond all rational expectations in expanding student numbers. It had done so while the per capita funding was actually reduced. Between 1984 and 1998 numbers had risen by 35% while the funding for each student dropped by 36% between 1989 and 1997. There were no more so-called efficiency gains to be squeezed from budgets to bolster institutional finances. There was a funding crisis. The Tory government funked it. It avoided taking the decision which the incoming Labour government in May 1997 took when it received the Committee’s report in July 1997; student tuition fees would be levied in future and maintenance allowances scrapped, all to be replaced with a student loan scheme, with a raft of exemptions necessary to protect those who could not afford such fees. This was not an exact version of Dearing’s recommendation of how students should bear some of the costs of their higher education. But the principle was grasped. Public money for higher education had to be supplemented from somewhere and part of that somewhere had to be students. And with it the redistributive principle was upheld. It was a move to correct the long-standing and unacceptable fact that one section of the population was being supported in higher education in part by tax monies from those with the lowest incomes. This injustice as many see it was worsened by the general tendency for the gap to widen between the incomes of graduates and those of non-graduates.

But charging fees immediately raised questions about value for money in a completely different way for higher education. Employers had long since raised complaining voices that the newly graduated men and women they took on as employees needed additional training before they were fit for the job to which they had been appointed. They went further. They questioned the nature of the curriculum as a preparation for employment. They queried the quality of the teaching which students received. But now with fees to pay, students too would press those same questions about the quality of the service they were receiving.

All that was part of a long-standing argument between higher education and government about what academic staff actually did for their salaries. This was a loaded argument because both sides knew that there were plenty of examples of idle, lazy or even incompetent academic staff who fulfilled neither their research obligations nor properly their responsibilities as teachers of students, despite the fact that the vast majority of academics were thoroughly committed to their posts. The unhappy result of this kind of public slanging match was that the recognition was never given to the staff who alone made that expansion possible.

The research part of the equation was brought into sharp focus as the Funding Councils devised ways of conducting Research Assessments of the research actually undertaken by each higher education institution and used the results of those assessments to weight the annual sums disbursed to universities and colleges. Naturally, this tended to concentrate the attention of all academics and their senior colleagues on producing evidence of research activities. Naturally too, this raised anxieties on the part of many in the system, that undue attention to research inevitably risked by accident or design demoting teaching as a less valuable activity and diminishing its quality. The introduction of a Teaching Assessment exercise to run parallel with the research inquiries did something to tilt the balance back towards looking for excellence in teaching. How far excellent teaching results in enhanced learning by students is another matter. But research remained the weightier factor.

In part, therefore, the Dearing recommendation for the establishment of an Institute of Learning and Teaching can be seen as a response to all those variegated pressures. Alongside its attempt to find ways of creating an alternative financial regime to combat the funding problems of the higher education system, clearly it sought to help institutions find ways of improving the quality of teaching as a counterbalance to the weight which had been placed on research. At the same time, by establishing a new professional body it sought to heighten the status of teaching in higher education alongside that accorded to research. This was all the more important because the full title of the report was Higher Education in the Learning Society. Throughout there were implications for higher education in promoting Lifelong Learning. But if higher education was to make its proper contribution to that concept - Lifelong Learning in a learning society - it was obvious that it would need to pay close attention to its approaches to learning and teaching, especially of older students. Older students are not older versions of 18-plus students. They are different and much of higher education has a good deal to learn about what those differences mean for learning and teaching.

Beyond that too, the heavy emphasis in explaining the recommendation on the need for the UK to sustain its academic reputation in the global knowledge market, highlighted the need for higher education to tend its laurels rather than rest on them. So the Institute for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education is no trendy piece of window dressing for the system. It is deadly serious business.

However, long before the Dearing Committee made its recommendation, there were other bodies, not to mention universities and colleges, which took just as seriously, and some would argue more professionally, the need to try to enhance the sheer professionalism of teaching in higher education. The Universities and Colleges Staff Development Agency (UCoSDA) was started by the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) in 1988 with a certain amount of prodding from government. This was to be the universities’ engine for academic staff development. In 1990 the CVCP set up its Academic Audit Unit, again under some pressure from government. Both were flying early warning signs to the system that Whitehall was beginning to conduct a rather more detailed scrutiny of what universities were actually doing. And both were responses of the CVCP to those pressures in an effort to demonstrate that universities were not only able to tackle the questions of quality which implicitly government was questioning, but to do so in an open, transparent way. Unfortunately, the CVCP never gave to UCoSDA the same strong support it gave to its Audit Unit, so that the potential for staff development was never exploited. Funding problems produced a contractual relationship between UCoSDA and the Department of Employment, an arrangement which did not recommend itself to much of the system. It smacked of government intervention which was both resisted and resented.

At this point it is instructive to note that from 1987 to 1988 Ron Dearing was chairman of the Council for National Academic Awards, the academic authority for all degrees and diplomas taught outside the universities. He was also chair on the Polytechnics and Colleges Funding Council from 1988 to 1993, chair of the Universities Funding Council from 1991 to 1993 and chair of the Higher Education Funding Council for England from 1992 to 1993. His views about staff development in higher education were those of a thoroughly well-informed insider.

However, in the public sector as then was, colleges and polytechnics had long had the Standing Conference on Educational Development (SCED). This was a voluntary organisation with no official institutional standing, composed of individuals who were committed to the concept of staff development. Nor were those two bodies, UCoSDA and SCED, the only ones to take a close interest in staff development. The Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) had a group of members which, like SCED, were concerned to promote ideas about staff development throughout the system. The time was when that group felt it lacked adequate support from the SRHE and so it negotiated a merger with SCED to create the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA). SEDA then had the idea of promoting a scheme which would raise the profile of education development in general and in particular the proficiency of teachers in higher education. To this end it developed an Accreditation of Teachers in Higher Education Scheme (ATHES). In 1991 it was launched as a pilot exercise. It proved successful and the Scheme was launched nationally in 1993. Like the pilot, this was successful nationally. By 1997 when Dearing began sitting, some seventy institutions had their programmes recognised by SEDA and more were waiting approval, some of which were overseas. By then it had some 2000 academic staff who had met its requirements for accreditation.

And then there was the Association of University Teachers (AUT), which kept an ear to the ground about these matters in the interests of its members. This meant that there were three interested groups committed to the overall concept of staff development in higher education long before the Tories thought up the idea of using the Dearing Committee as an escape route from facing up to the problems of financing the expanded system which they had promoted.

Putting UCoSDA, SEDA and the AUT together amounted to a solid commitment within higher education to staff development across institutions for improving learning and teaching by the mid-1990s. Indeed it would have been hard to find a university or college which did not by that time have some sort of programme to advance the professionalism of its academic staff. There were education development units and centres for education initiative in all parts of the country. But like many initiatives in education at any level, in no sense was it systematic and inevitably was bound to be patchy. It all meant, however, that when Dearing produced the recommendation for an Institute of Learning and Teaching, in many ways it was pushing against an open door.

That is not to say there were no problems. Perhaps the largest was another body in the field which had caused much anxiety on higher education since its establishment in 1986 - the National Council for Vocational Qualifications (NCVQ). This was a new body introduced to create some coherence among the myriad organisations which offered vocational qualifications that hundreds of thousands of students in further education took every year. With differing levels of success, it tried to do so by using a competence model of achievement, based on functional analysis, with a yes/no assessment system. This seemed perilously near to introducing behavioural objectives as a template for designing curricula. Philosophically this was antipathetic to higher education’s views of itself, and indeed brought into play a vigorous argument about the differences between vocational training and education. The NCVQ had from its beginning the intention and ambition to apply its vocational approach to every level of higher education awards. Hence higher education’s anxieties.

So when it was known well in advance of the publication of the Dearing Report that there would be a recommendation to establish an Institute for Learning and Teaching, both SEDA and the AUT sought to take the initiative, knowing full well how, given a chance, the NCVQ, and the then to be established Quality Assurance Agency as a successor to the Higher Education Quality Council would attempt to make the running for the new Institute. Some would say they looked for a pre-emptive strike. Together they approached Professor Clive Booth, recently retired as Vice Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University and as Vice Chairman of the CVCP. They sought him out as a trusted honest broker, to chair a group convened through the CVCP to think through some of the implications of the yet to be recommended ILT. Given the experience of universities with other government-inspired initiatives of the Quality Assurance Agency and the Funding Council concerning criteria for assessing the effectiveness of both teaching and research, it was clearly in the interests of the CVCP to develop is own proposals for the ILT rather than wait to see what other suggestions might appear.

Hence it was in anticipation of the Dearing recommendations that the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) convened an Accreditation and Teaching in Higher Education: Planning Group. Fourteen national bodies were represented in that group (see membership list in Appendix 1) to produce a design for the new Institute. Beginning work in June 1997 it commissioned a paper by an outside consultant which went out for comments from institutions in October 1997. Among other findings the investigation confirmed that there was a substantial amount of staff development but that, unsurprisingly, its institutional and geographical coverage was patchy. A second consultation document, composed in the light of the seventy-five responses received to the first, was sent out in January 1998 with a series of questions to which answers were asked for by March 1998.

That consultation document outlined the group’s ideas for the purpose of the ILT. It was, they said:

• to enhance the status of teaching in higher education;
• to maintain and improve the quality of learning and teaching in higher education;
• to set standards of good professional practice that its members, and in due course, all those with teaching and learning responsibilities in higher education might follow.

It raised the question as to what, if any, connection there should be between membership of the Institute and the probation of newly appointed tutors; and further whether membership should constitute a licence to practice. Unsurprisingly, when those questions were put out for discussion, both where rejected firmly. It also raised questions about possible relationships with other professional bodies and the long-standing subject groups organised by specialist academics themselves.

The document included a draft of a national statement as a basis for planning programmes for the accreditation referred to in the Dearing recommendation.

This is where AP(E)L makes its surprising, and as it turned out, definitive entry. It also offered a detailed illustration of how routes to membership might work as a catalyst for further discussion. The paper was at pains to ensure adequate arrangements for experienced staff to achieve membership should they want it. Paragraph 1.18 says:

Individuals would achieve professional membership of the Institute having successfully met the requirements of an accredited programme or pathway. These could be work-based, course-based, involve one-to-one mentoring, distance and open learning, the assessment of prior (experiential) learning AP(E)L, or various combinations of those or other modes.

It would be hard to imagine a more comprehensive set of possible routes to membership, just as in advance it is difficult to have foreseen that AP(E)L was to appear as a recommended means of seeking membership.

The paper went on to emphasise the need to meet the requirements of experienced staff and to be sensitive to the position of academic staff who might find themselves moving from one institution to another. Paragraph 1.19 went on:

It will be important to enable staff to gain membership of the Institute wholly or partly by way of their demonstrable experience and qualifications and to cater for people moving from one HEI to another whilst following an accredited programme. One way of doing this would be to draw on and adapt as necessary the experience of schemes of assessment that recognise individuals prior experience and learning. Some of the schemes are known by the term ‘accreditation of prior (experiential)’ learning (AP(E)L), but this is using the word accreditation differently from its use in the present paper. However, the AP(E)L approach deserves very serious consideration as one possib...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1: Beginnings
• 2: Preparing to launch
• 3: The assessment of prior experiential learning (AP(E)L) in the UK since 1980
• 4: Coming to terms with AP(E)L: institutions and individuals
• 5: Getting going
• 6: Some flavours of institutional accredited courses
• 7: Towards individual membership
• 8: Fast track to membership
• 9: Towards a scholarship of teaching: continuing professional development
• 10: Where next for the ILT?
• Appendix 1: Accreditation and Teaching in Higher Education Planning Group
• Appendix 2: Institute for Learning and Teaching Planning Group
• Appendix 3: Table 1
• Appendix 4: Table 2