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