Will dons make the grade in class?

Academics must know how to teach if they want to be promoted. Judith Judd reports on how they are being assessed, while Lesley Gerard looks at the verdicts given for two law faculties

Teaching, for generations the poor relation of research in universities, is becoming an essential ingredient for success as an academic. At Reading University, academics must clock up points for teaching as well as research to secure promotion. Even at traditional Cambridge, promotion depends partly on teaching prowess.

Universities' new-found concentration on how students are taught is the result of government changes in funding which mean that money is distributed partly on the basis of teaching quality. Assessors trained by the Higher Education Funding Council, a government quango, examine documents, interview students and watch staff teaching before grading a department excellent, satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

Universities are angry about the assessments. Academics at the old universities in particular consider the intrusion of outsiders into the lecture hall a challenge to academic freedom.

It is a measure of their fury that the present arrangements are about to change. For the past two years, univeristies have carried out self- assessments, which they submitted to the funding council, which then decided whether to visit them. If, as in most cases, they were deemed neither unsatisfactory nor excellent, the assessors did not visit. Universities protested that the failure to visit meant poor marketing skills could deny a department its "excellent" tag. They also claimed that some assessors were high-handed and incompetent.

The funding council gave way. From next month, all universities will be visited and will either pass or fail their assessment. They will be graded from four (top) to one (bottom) on six different counts: curriculum, teaching and assessment, student progress and achievement, student welfare, resources, and how they ensure quality. Visits will take place every six or seven years.

Will they make universities happier? Dr Peter Milton, associate director of the funding council's quality assessment division, thinks it should. "Once the cutting edge of excellence has disappeared we shan't get the business of some universities becoming very upset because one of their departments hasn't been rated excellent."

He says the calibre of assessors has improved. These are all academics recommended either by professional bodies such as the Royal Society of Chemistry or by individual universities. Originally, Dr Milton suggests, the old universities were reluctant to nominate candidates because they disapproved of the scheme. Now they are at least resigned to it.

The view from the universities is less sanguine. Having successfully scuppered one system, they are not sure that its replacement is much better. Ted Nield of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals recognises that the Government has to check up on what is happening to £3bn of public money but questions whether the amount of staff time required to produce the paperwork and the effort expended on inspection are worthwhile.

"There are 12,000 courses in UK universities," he says. "One visit to every department is an immense task. If it goes on like this, one half of the university system will be spending all its time inspecting the other half."

For the funding council is not the only body in the university assessment business. The Higher Education Quality Council, set up and financed by the universities themselves, also visits and requires another set of paperwork. The council is a successor to the body set up by vice-chancellors to head off the threat of government-backed assessment. Kenneth Clarke, former secretary of state for education, was not impressed and went ahead with the funding council scheme.

To the outsider, the co-existence of the two appears curious, and talks are in progress about how they might draw closer together.

The quality council, however, points out that its role is very different from the funding council's. Senior academics, nominated by vice-chancellors, visit universities to check that their procedures for assuring quality are appropriate. It is an audit based on interviews with staff rather than an assessment of them in action. Dr Roger Brown, the quality council's chief executive, says: "We report on institutional management of quality while the funding council reports on teaching and lecturing at the chalkface. The quality of teaching a student receives is the product not merely of subject teaching but of many other things, such as the quality of the laboratories and even how long they have to queue to get their chips at lunchtime."

At the end of the day, standards can be raised only with the support of university staff, he says. His council is not a soft touch: last year it described many universities' student assessment arrangements as "amateurish and ill-conceived". It is harder, he believes, for universities to discount such criticisms than if they came from the funding council or the Government.

Neither council believes the final solution to checking on university teaching has yet been reached. The funding council says it is looking at ways of reducing paperwork. Dr Milton also suggests that, by the end of the decade, judgements may be based more on univeristies' self-assessment rather than by external assessors.

Dr Brown goes farther, arguing that a robust self-assessment be put in place so his council would spend less time checking whether universities are giving value for money and more on raising standards of teaching, examining and management.

Whatever its defects, the present exercise is already changing universities. Academics are setting up teaching standards committees, watching each other teach and using teaching as a criterion for promotion. For their students that must mean progress.