LET'S TALK HONESTLY ABOUT QUALITY ASSURANCE AND THE MISMATCH OF GENERATIONAL EXPECTATIONS

LET'S TALK HONESTLY ABOUT QUALITY ASSURANCE AND THE MISMATCH OF GENERATIONAL EXPECTATIONS: Managing necessary change in educational institutions.

Times in education have been changing for 30 years or so. Pupils and students have been left behind for at least 4 school generations,?(20 years or more) because schools and colleges have failed to recognise and accept the need for change.

The complexities of this past year has brought home this recognition across the globe of the need for change but universities, especially in Asia, are still holding onto the past and traditional norms.?Scared to change, scared of losing their intellectual relevance, scared of unknown future scenarios, scared of the loss on income, scared of losing viability and wholly unprepared for the new expectations they are now being forced to recognise and can no longer avoid.

Australia was probably one of the first nation to realise transformation was required the needs of youth expectations in rapidly changing markets, Queensland to be more specific, was probably the first school system to accept and lead change in their national testing system way back in the mid 1990’s. So twenty five years ago they ran a deep review by seeking out and listening to the voices of 10,000 stakeholders. The change was to produce outcomes that were actually useful to employers and that their main customer base, their students who realised the shift was actually useful to their futures, to their employment and the life-skills they needed to remain employable for meaningful careers.

So Queensland moved away from being tied to traditional O and A level curriculum, and began instead to offer internships and authentic portfolio based team-working experiences. So that when these young people were going for interviews for jobs or for college places, they were not all presenting the same certificates but rather offering real life experiences and portfolios of authentic work, vocational and project based learnings that they could talk about and discuss during interviews, In essence they were being treated as adults and expected to behave as adults. Realising that these new learning opportunities were actually preparing them for their lives in uncertain and volatile times they became far more engaged and took greater responsibility for their learning.

We are at a unique and unknown place in compulsory education whereby the teachers generally have no idea of what roles, what jobs they are preparing their pupils for. How could they, new roles are appearing in the marketplace daily now? 50 years ago they knew, we were either destined for a factory, or a building site, or for technical college, Higher National Diplomas, or for university.?Now they have no idea whatsoever as to the academic knowledge that young people need – the kids themselves know far better and as the Google generation are used to finding out answers by themselves immediately: run a Google search for Life Skills, over 8 billion results in 0.5 second - ?and we wonder why our students are bored brainless in their classrooms with teachers whose only concern is to get through the syllabus and prepared for testing and more rote testing.

?Managing Change:

I have been working with groups of educators for twenty years, and the trick to having them come together to affect positive quality improvements is to select, train and support change mentors, and use coaching skills to enable high performing teams to pull together with an agreed goal. ?As with any complex change we need to ensure that these teams are professionally coached to function at their highest performance.?

?Here are some of the most typical barriers to progress – use this as a tick-box exercise perhaps.

Coaching high performing teams:

The main issue is not forming the teams themselves, but to move the members from GROUPS into High Performing Teams and to KEEP them in the teams, to ensure they STAY in the team & are ENGAGED.?

Offering incentives -?We need to engage them in the first instance, get them on your side and ensure they have the SUPPORT they need from day 1,

PREPARE them for the task,

AGREE the GOALS each team needs to aim for, so we need to

LISTEN to them,

RECOGNISE their SUCCESSES and

SHOW APPRECIATION by

COLLABORATING and SHARING best practices.

And LESSONS LEARNED reviews , that’s really the secret of to how to make consistent progress, to RECOGNISE and REFLECT upon your lessons learned, with the engagement and under advisory of your senior management.

All obvious so far, and I’m sure you are doing this – as these are just the essentials of team leadership.?But how is this utopic scenario WORKING FOR YOU??Usually not to plan, nor within the timeframes you need to comply with. ??Effective change needs trained coaches. Trained Change agents and staff that are engaged in the change process.

Lets briefly talk about colleges that were unable to prove effective transformation was being considered, under review and in process. I’ve witnessed failure and the collapse of colleges within weeks of a formal QAA assessment. You generally have a three month window and QA guidance as to which functional process elements are the most important to work towards. The main issue here is over-inflating QA self-assessment scores – easily done, but a price to pay. Then if grades have been inflated and college is STILL not showing improvements, the institutes operating license is just withdrawn… game over.?The college is just closed down by the MoE, operating license can be revoked, and I have seen this happen within a matter of weeks.

Now we have the ‘teach-out’, which can take three years if any students wish to remain. I’ve seen this happen to well established institutions both in the GCC and Asia. One premier institution was closed down almost overnight, another well-known American institution was also shut down in both Bahrain and Jordan, with a painful three year teach out for increasingly dwindling student numbers and income.

Not investing time and skills in change leadership and your staff engagement can be a very expensive and embarrassing mistake. Usually, board decisions are influenced by the advice of the money, their accountants. – not the leading academic staff.

Stakeholder Trust, Communication systems in schools and colleges can actually be quite dysfunctional. Which is very strange, as the staff are experienced teachers, …. empathetic and communicative people, then why should the institutions they are employed by be notoriously bad at communicating, whether it be horizontally and especially vertically within the leadership hierarchies? This usually, once again, comes back to the institution’s flexible and listening leadership, or rather the lack thereof.

So, where the communication feedback loop is a barrier it must be addressed as a priority or we lose the trust of our customers and stakeholders – students leave. Your paying customers are your students and their parents, then the stakeholders: staff and the management, then out to the various, and increasing, stakeholder groups that may lie outside of your circle of influence.

Institutions have all mapped out stakeholder groups, but have you as a college reviewed your stakeholder communications matrix of late??What are your feedback collection methods, how effective are they, how Objective are they? What are the performance measures used to review the effectiveness, are the targets sensible for your situation at this time, are you closing the loop?

Lets talk briefly about the importance for effective change in gathering feedback

Focus group methodology:

Do you use valid focus group methods to collect data or just questionnaires, are you sampling student groups face to face, collecting all feedback on file, offering 360 degree feedback? All much needed assessment evidence.

Increasingly the democratisation of influential social media can ensure that disgruntled stakeholders can air their opinions to a global audience – reputations that have been built over decades can be negated in weeks, or days.

What risk mitigation have you put into place to assure your university’s ?reputation, viability and sustainability cannot be damaged?

With change management of this magnitude we need to have the teams readied, to have prioritised and AGREED each team’s goals, and imperatively, to be offering practical and consistent support. Team PLUS individual coaching….

Do you have the trained and enthusiastic coaches mentors and change agents in place???How best to train and equip these imperative mentors to lead the teams to greater intrinsic motivation and thus, increased performance?

Performance indicators,

Another problem to recognise is that the structure and wording of performance measures and outcome statements can be off-putting too, more often that not the reason for staff push-back. Make your QA targets doable. This sounds sensible, but so many performance measures are frankly so high as to be unattainable. Remember to keep your actual KPI’s to a minimum, those HS&E (this is Compliance) and the targets that are reported up. Targets that are unreasonable puts your QA self-assessment staff in a quandary, eager perhaps to overstate the improvements made to functional processes, leading to major problems down the line.

Indicated performance measures are not necessarily targets to expect to reach next month, maybe not even next year. Often, they are overstated and underperformed upon, especially if your teams lose their members or motivators, managing change improvements may take over 3 or 4 years of continual improvement strategies - REVIEW and REFLECTION to TEST and IMPLEMENT; ?an organic process, constantly evolving, there is no final destination other than taking quality enhancements upwards - towards the light…

As with my January 2022 New Year’s resolution to get healthier & fitter, the most positive approach is incremental improvement, aim for a sensible outcome this year otherwise you’re likely to get hurt. ?If last year’s quantitative performance measure was achieved at 45% then make it 50% for this next year, not 85% forced down on staff by leadership as too often is the case. Take the sensible and feasible approach, easy does it, especially when you take into account the risks that now lie beyond your control post Covid. If you aim too high, and then promptly lose a team member or two the team becomes immobile and frustrated, then the measure will show you missed the target by miles and your institution can be penalised in the MoE official assessment or the triangulation of evidence QA assessors’ visit.?Better to show small but positive incremental forward motion than a backward steps.

Keep it simple and manageable. All that assessors and administration are seeking is improvement processes in action, rather than impressive and yet unsustainable goals to meet tight short-term targets. Over this past few years QA assessors are trained to listen effectively. To listen and appreciate your individual institutions problem areas and how those areas are recognised and the plans put into place to affect positive improvement – so utilise that by spending the first day of a visit showing them, ensure they are aware of priority issues prior to face to face assessment interviews and the calls for documentary evidence. ?Even use the intro of your self-assessment report to itemise the issues you acknowledge and the processes in place.

Facilitate incentives to enable the support and retention of your staff, who need to feel valued, respected, recognised, rewarded and above all, appreciated.

Institutions need to bear in mind that it is expected that around 8-10% of profits must be put back into staff development, and if you select a library of appropriate micro-learning certifications, such as those from Coursera, edX or Future Learn then you are offering a real and valued incentive for your staff to stay on and put their years of experience into future-proofing your curriculum and imperatively your students.

A couple of short and free MOOCs that can make a difference immediately are Project Management Essentials (Project Management Institute) and Creative Ideation, problem solving divergent and convergent brainstorming – these two short online programmes are great for staff effectiveness as well as necessary life-skills for your students. Also, cancel out the generational mismatch of expectations (one of the greatest factors for disengagement) between the college admin, staff and students, pilot the use of a simple online discussion forum feature in a couple of programmes and see the student engagement rise with peer and peripheral learning as multiple intelligences are catered for.

Get the students involved in peer teaching – Flip the classes across to promote students engagement and learning outcomes leadership. Teachers are no longer a Sage on a Stage, but rather a facilitator, a Guide on the Side. It’s quite painless, fun even…. The Khan Academy was not a new idea?- we have been blending and flipping learning to engage students for 20 years.

In summation, what is important for long term successful quality improvement processes in your respective institutions is leadership support from flexible, transparent and brave innovative leaders

I could discuss these issues and solutions all day, so thank you for your attention, and please do contact me if you need practical advice.?

Laurence Brown

Malvern, UK October 2021