The View From Here

Higher education is suffering from an affliction that is threatening to kill it or, at best, leave it severely debilitated. The symptoms are unsteady gait and staring eyes. It is known as Mad Audit Disease.

In my own department we had 10 different audits in one year. No sooner had the inspectors of our undergraduate courses left than in came the squad looking at postgraduate teaching. They just beat the auditors of our research, who in turn preceded the research council's appraisal of our research training.

Meanwhile, the university's internal review was followed by an external version before an analysis of management and administration, and so it went on. Now we are well into another similar cycle, just as the ink has dried. Chris Woodhead, the senior chief inspector, has even ordered a reinspection of the primary teacher training inspections carried out just three months ago.

I am strongly in favour of internal and external inspection, but on a reasonable scale. Mad Audit Disease is debilitating, because it sucks valuable time away from more important duties. The amount of paper being prepared for each audit is ludicrous. Hundreds of pages are written by people whose efforts would be better directed towards their discipline.

Many of the audits are unco-ordinated, carried out by different internal and external agencies. You cannot print out a job-lot of departmental information from an existing database, as each auditor wants it in bespoke, rather than off-the-peg, form. The funding council requires everybody's four greatest hits 1992 to 1996 for the current Research Assessment Exercise, but other inspections may ask for a complete list.

Separately conceived and differently focused audits often contradict each other. A teaching review may put more emphasis on teaching and less on research; a research audit may pay more attention to research and less to teaching, while a management review may demand more committees, and more time, on administration.

The push for accountability is perfectly legitimate. Higher education receives millions of pounds of public money and so must be accountable. But one of the worst features of this demand is the whole Kwality industry that has sprung up to nurture it. "Wanted urgently: writer of mission statements and forward plans. Applications to Piddlington University." "Wanted urgently: reader of mission statements and forward plans. Applications to Acme Inspection Agency plc."

Sadly, most academics, despite their phenomenal memory in their discipline, are unlikely to recall a single sentence of their own department's deathless prose. "Compare and contrast your department's 1996 forward plan with its 1994 and 1992 forward plans ..."

The story is told, and it may be apocryphal, of a school that got "excellent" for its Kwality Assurance procedures, but failed its inspection. I remember visiting an unimpressive institution under the old Council for National Academic Awards scheme and receiving a several-hundred-page submission, vastly longer than some of the greatest books in the world. Much of it was candy floss. Paper is no substitute for process.

It makes you wonder how some of the truly outstanding individuals in history ever made it. Was Rembrandt ever awarded the Amsterdam Certificate of Paint Mixing Proficiency? Did Erasmus proudly chair the Kwality Assurance Committee when he was at Cambridge? Were Mozart's 50-plus symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 23 string quartets and 35 violin sonatas all in his mission statement? Did inspectors catch Michelangelo sneakily painting the ceiling when he should have been writing his forward plan?

I blame Margaret Thatcher for Mad Audit Disease. Her deep suspicion of her own colleagues rippled down right through the system. Panic-stricken ministers hounded their menials, who in turn squeezed the professions. The latter were already being stigmatised by the right wing as self-interest groups, serving their own, rather than clients', interests.

Once distrust was sown, universities, like schools, over-reacted. Teachers in schools ticked endless boxes to record every tiny sliver of the national curriculum that had been taught. Many universities set up over-elaborate procedures and paper-generating machines to feed the voracious Kwality monster.

Accountability and inspection should be simple and should enhance what is done, not distract from it. The next government could do worse than reintroduce a degree of trust into its transactions with educational institutions. Lack of trust and respect for professional people has wrought great chaos in education.

Perhaps I have got it wrong. Next time I am in Florence I must take a closer look at Michelangelo's statue of David. I may have missed the little kitemark on its bum

The author is Professor of Education, Exeter University.