Cost of university inspection is '£250m each year'

Two skips full of paper, a worn-out photocopier, 1.8 man-years of work and a £250m bill were claimed yesterday as the costs of the day the university inspector called.

Two skips full of paper, a worn-out photocopier, 1.8 man-years of work and a £250m bill were claimed yesterday as the costs of the day the university inspector called.

Inspecting one department at the University of Leeds produced enough paper to fill an entire wall with files, according to a report on bureaucracy published yesterday.

Academic assessors from the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education visit every university department and publish school-style reports on standards.

But the Higher Education Funding Council, who used Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan Universities as the basis for their study, found that universities generated vast amounts of red tape coping with the assessments.

In one case, a department spent £11,000 on a new photocopier "worn out by all the paperwork required. Another department at Newcastle filled two skips with documents.

Sir Brian Fender, the chief executive of the funding council, said: "We are committed to ensuring that the accountability requirements placed on universities and colleges are kept to the necessary minimum."

Management consultants PA Consulting estimated that the cost of university inspections was £50m but said that the total annual cost of holding higher education to account was £250m.

A study by the Association of University Teachers estimated that each inspection led to the equivalent of 1.8 years' work for an academic during the year of the inspection and that administration accounted for 13.5 per cent of academics' time.

The QAA said the agency was already introducing "light touch" inspections. John Randall, the agency's chief executive, said the new system "should ensure that effort expended on dealing with external scrutiny is no more than is needed to enable reliable judgements to be made."