Increasing Accountability

“Universities are increasingly populated by the undead: a listless population of academics, managers, administrators, and students, all shuffling to the beat of the corporatist drum.... In this bleak landscape the source of the zombie contagion lurks in the form of bland, mechanical speech ... peppered with affectless references to citation indices, ERA rankings, ARC applications, FoR codes, AUQA reviews, and the like. ...Many zombies appear incapable of responding meaningfully to the tyranny of performance indicators, shifting promotion criteria, escalating workload demands and endless audits, evaluations and reviews. Try as they may to resist, zombies merely acquiesce to the corporatist line.” (Gora & Whelan, 2010)

To make sense of Gora and Whelan’s apocalyptic vision Links to an external site., you need to understand the call for greater accountability in higher education. This is due to many factors, not least growing expenditure on higher education due to increasing enrolments, political and social beliefs about the role and importance of higher education to society and the economy, and concerns about the 'knowledge society' and how to create and engage with it. We’ve essentially seen the role of government shift from a provider of education to a purchaser of education (on behalf of students, who then pay back part of the cost). In this context, ‘value for money’ has increased emphasis. The accountability and regulatory regimes that Australian universities currently work under are manifold, with an increased emphasis on efficiency, effectiveness, quality and performance of higher education systems and institutions, accompanied by development of metrics, regulatory reporting, quality audits and standards for qualifications, institutional operations (including governance) and (in some disciplines) learning outcomes (Stensaker & Harvey, 2011).

What does accountability and regulation look like in Australia?

Module 10. Quality assurance and our responsibilities: Helping guide your development looked at the Australian Qualifications Framework Links to an external site. (AQF), the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) Links to an external site. and the Higher Education Standards Framework (HESF) Links to an external site.. To recap briefly, the AQF provides a set of standards which Australian qualifications must meet, and includes learning outcomes for each AQF level and qualification type (AQF, 2013). AQF qualification types range from Certificate 1 (AQF Level 1) to doctoral degrees (AQF Level 10), and the Framework is intended to facilitate pathways to, and through, formal qualifications. The role of the AQF is to ensure that qualifications are consistent in their learning outcomes and levels of attained skills across institutions.

TEQSA is an independent statutory authority residing under the portfolio of the Australian Government Department of Education. Its role is to regulate and measure the quality of the Australian higher education sector. It takes a risk proportionate and standards based approach to accreditation and audit, using both a risk assessment process (Regulatory Risk Framework) and a set of reference standards known as the Higher Education Standards Framework (HESF).

The HESF provides Standards for Higher Education – 'the minimum acceptable institutional conditions, arrangements and levels of performance for the provision of higher education’. It also includes Criteria for Higher Education Providers – governing eligibility to apply for registration as a higher education provider, authority for self-accreditation of courses of study, and classification of the different types of higher education providers. The Higher Education Standards Panel (HESP) Links to an external site., established in 2011, is a legislative body that provides advice to the Minister for Education on the development and content of the Higher Education Standards Framework.