AUSTRALIA: Who is accountable for what?

The university today is far different from that of the early 1990s and the work of academics has changed considerably, driven by the efficiency and accountability agenda. Often the cry for efficiency and accountability has been used as a mechanism for control, cost reductions and to drive policy agendas. In broad terms, management practices in tertiary education have shifted from a collegial to a corporate or commercial paradigm. A by-product has been a shift in power from academia to the hierarchy, with a managerial emphasis on deploying staff to meet strategic goals and cost effectiveness. In Australian Universities Review, John Kenny discusses the state of tertiary education in Australia, linked to an account of experiences at the University of Tasmania, to consider the cumulative effects of changes and to question whether the prevailing management is the most appropriate way forward.


The following is a an abbreviated version of Efficiency and Effectiveness in Higher Education: Who is accountable for what?, published in the latest edition of Australian Universities Review.**

Rationale

There is an extensive range of literature indicating that modern organisations function in a highly complex, competitive world that is increasingly globalised, networked by new technologies, uncertain and unpredictable. There is growing recognition that new forms of organisation are required to deal with this environment, ones in which the organisational values are linked directly to a strategic vision based around a culture of learning.

Stacey (1995) argued that successful organisations in this modern environment need to operate in an almost chaotic state of 'bounded instability'. He argued that organisations have both formal and informal networks. While the formal structures promote order and stability, 'the shifting network of social and other informal contacts between people within an organisation and across its boundaries' are the basis of innovation and change.

Wietzel and Jonnson (1989) argued that organisational 'decline is the result of less than effective management of an organisation, its resources and the sensing mechanisms related to its long term survival.' The long term survival of an organisation relies on management receiving 'good information', taking 'prompt action' and instituting 'effective reorganisation' based around 'less directive leadership' and greater inclusiveness for those lower in the organisation who may have valuable information to add to decision making.

Owen (2003) similarly argued for an 'evaluation culture' where staff are included in the decision making process by contributing their knowledge, gained through practice, to the ongoing development of the organisation. Mintzberg (1994) called for staff to be seen as 'effective strategists' helping to inform radical strategic direction for an organisation, not as passive 'implementors' of pre-determined actions. Mintzberg (1994) described universities as an example of a 'professional organisation' where the staff are 'notoriously loosely coupled' to the organisational processes, making top-down approaches to management and control in these organisations problematic.

The management dilemma

Operating in a conventional management paradigm, there have been persistent attempts by government and management to 'codify', that is demystify, or make more 'visible' the work of professionals as a function of centralised planning approaches. Dearman (2003) linked this back to the 'accountability crisis' of the 1970s which led to attempts by governments to define and control professional work in the name of greater public accountability'. He noted that this approach has led to the intensification of academic work because of the need to fully account for the use of time due to efficiency related accountability measures.

Crebert (2000), Patterson (2001) and Fenske (1980) expressed doubt about the suitability of such managerial control approaches to the university sector. Lines (2000) was concerned that 'the extensive use of predetermined goals and objectives' has led 'to organisations that are over managed and under-led'. Patterson (2001) and Mintzberg (1994) pointed to the independent nature of teachers and academics in universities as a key reason for the lack of suitability of corporate approaches.

So there is a contradiction in regards to universities between what is advocated in the management literature to deal with complexity and change and the use of top-down centralised managerial control approaches in Australian Universities. As the centralised planning approach has been in widespread use across the sector for over a decade, we should now be in a position to evaluate it as an effective approach for tertiary education. What does the evidence have to say about the outcomes of these effects on the sector?

Exploring outcomes

The facts indicate that this extended period of emphasis on quality, efficiency and accountability by governments and management has produced profound changes in tertiary education. There is no doubt that many positive benefits have resulted and universities today are quite different places to a decade ago. Aided by developments in new technologies, they are more flexible in their offerings, more responsive to student needs, have opened up new markets at home and internationally and have undergone unprecedented growth (Lines 2000; Patterson 2001).

However, over this same period, there has been a progressive decline in government funding and a steady rise in staff-student ratios. Dorothy Illing (2006) reported that the government contribution to higher education as a percentage of revenue is down to 41%, a drop of nearly 20% in 10 years.

According to the Australian Geoscience Council, a professional body representing over 7,000 geoscientists, there has been a fall in government outlays on higher education since 1996, from 0.72% of GDP to an estimated 0.52% in 2004. This has led to a shortfall of over $530 million, had funding kept pace with inflation. The Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee (AVCC) puts this figure at over $550 million.

This indicates that placing limits on funding has been a key strategy used by government to control the higher education agenda and drive change to make universities more efficient. It has led university managers to strive for new markets and promote change within their institutions.

Teaching is a profession conducted largely in isolation, in a practical sense, but shaped by institutional pressures. Apart from the push to embrace new information technologies, those pressures come in the form of various managerial, market and financial adjustments: the drive to complete PhDs, state scrutiny of research and teaching outcomes, work intensification, pressure to acquire teaching qualifications and a substantial re-framing of student staff relationships (Dearman 2003).

The question is, having brought about some fundamental change, is the centralised planning approach the most suitable for the ongoing development of the tertiary education sector? Is it time the question was changed from 'What is an efficient way to manage higher education?' to 'What is the most effective?'

Efficiency and effectiveness

Efficiency is not the same as effectiveness. Viljoen (1994) described efficiency as relating to 'how well an activity or operation is performed.' Effectiveness relates to performing the correct activity or operation. In other words, efficiency measures how well an organisation does what it does, but effectiveness raises value questions about what the organisation should be doing in the first place.

It can be argued that the point has been reached in higher education, where the drive for efficiency is reducing effectiveness and the quality of teaching and learning. The Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee warned of the danger of taking productivity drives too far: that there is a limit to the extent of productivity savings in education, such as trading off productivity savings for salary increases.

As the AVCC's indexation report states, higher education is a 'labour intensive industry'. As in other sectors of the economy, new information and communication technology has been explored as a means of increasing efficiency, however, in education, rather than enabling staff reductions, the adoption of new technologies has actually 'changed the way in which staff support the learning of students.'

In the education sector productivity increases usually translate into increased workloads, higher student-staff ratios and reduced wages. The AVCC noted that student-staff ratios in Australian Universities have grown from 15.6 in 1996 to 20.8 in 2003, an increase of over 30%! The Geoscience Council (2002) noted that the reduced federal government spending on higher education has had a dramatic effect on academic salaries. Chapman (2001) expanded on the effects of this reduction of support on quality outcomes:

"(the) long term decline in the relative remuneration of academics... has been of the order of 25% since the early 1980s. As a consequence there have been increasing difficulties in attracting high quality staff, with implications for the delivery of higher education services."

In their report to the Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Goodrum, Hackling and Rennie (2001) presented data showing how these changes in funding have been affecting education faculties in Australian Universities.

'Even though student numbers have remained static during the 1990s', there has been a 21% reduction in full-time tenured staff and an 83% increase in casual staff. In one university they pointed to the impacts on the quality of teacher education. 'In 1990, first year primary teacher students participated in 21 to 24 contact hours of instruction compared to 12 hours in 1999.'

"Reduced budgets and staffing levels have forced education faculties to reduce the hours of class contact provided to students, adopt low cost, mass lecture and tutorial methods which are failing to produce the much higher standards of professional knowledge and skills, and capacity for educational leadership that are required by modern innovative schools." Goodrum et al." (2001)

If increased efficiency means doing more with less, then the evidence is clear that universities and the academics working in them have become more efficient. Viljoen (1994) noted that it may be 'relatively easy' to create an efficient organisation, but creating an effective one 'may be far more difficult.' Two critical questions arise if we want effective higher education institutions: 'What should universities do?' and 'What is the best way to manage universities so they will be effective?' If it is agreed that the core business of universities is teaching and research, then the second question is the critical one.

In classical management parlance, key stakeholders help to determine the strategic priorities of an organisation. Higher education has numerous stakeholders: government, industry, professional bodies, staff and students and each stakeholder group has its own perspective on what is valuable in higher education which needs to be considered.

For example, Crebbin (1997) described how stakeholders can hold different views in relation to quality university teaching. She noted that, due to their control over funding, government and managers have tended to dominate this discussion resulting in a linear, managerial view of what constitutes good teaching. From this perspective, 'good teaching' can be defined in terms of value adding and the planning process leads to predictable outcomes.

In this 'management discourse' quality control is achieved by external imposed requirements such as course approval processes: this 'cause and effect' view means that 'input and outcomes are assumed to have a direct connection'. Thus quality outcomes result from such things as the 'alignment of objectives and assessment, the use of efficiency measures such as 'completion rates and costs' and 'the pressure for mandatory academic appraisals' (Crebbin 1997). The presumption is that good learning will result from the right inputs.

"In contrast to management discourses of control and predictability, academics-teachers talk about good teaching as being uncertain, transient and interrelational...as a multi-dimensional process which has many indeterminate variables and where values come into conflict and outcomes cannot be pre-determined." Crebbin (1997)

The view of teaching held by academics, as described by Crebbin (1997) has much more in common with the current management literature than the linear management control processes currently practised by government and many institutions. In essence, Crebbin claimed the management view of teaching and learning has become dominant and has led to a 'shift of power' from academics.

There is now also an inherent contradiction in the dominant managerial view of teaching. Most institutions have responded to calls by employers for graduates who are independent lifelong learners and problem solvers, team players etc. Developing these skills, along with the desired 'deep' learning (Biggs 2003), requires more skilled teachers who can devise more intensive, carefully planned and varied teaching approaches than the mass lecture approaches of the past, especially in view of the diverse cohorts that now attend university. However resource reductions are working against this.

The same top-down external quality control process can be seen in the emerging Research Quality Framework (RQF). By applying the same arguments as used in the teaching discussion above, the attempts to control research outcomes using external mechanisms, governments and managers are also likely to distort the process and make it ineffective unless they include the voice of academics.

But there is a key factor compounding the inclusion of the academic perspective in decision making and this is linked directly to the nature of the profession itself. As Dearman (2003) noted, academia and teaching are isolating professions. It is therefore difficult to find a unified voice for academia and in this sense, academics leave themselves open to manipulation and control by the stronger, more unified voices of other stakeholders.

Enlightened managers can do much to encourage academics to find their voice, but ultimately it is up to members of the profession to advance their own interests.

Dr Kenny includes a short case study of how centralised control management and lack of academic input can lead to poor outcomes, describing the situation in the Faculty of Education at the University of Tasmania from the perspective of some academics who worked there. He goes on to argue that a significant danger for academics is that they will continue to operate as isolated individuals concentrating on their own individual welfare. If academics ignore their collegial and collective strength, then it is likely that their working conditions will continue to deteriorate.

Kenny then investigates the notion of accountability, pointing out that as much as academics are expected to be accountable, so too should key stakeholders such as governments and senior managers in organisations be held accountable - yet while systems of performance management and appraisal for academics have proliferated, there has been little discussion of how governments can be held more accountable nor of the suitability of current performance management processes for senior managers. He explores ideas around holding governments and senior managers to account, through two broad categories of standards - 'standards of professional practice' (such as responsibilities of occupational groups), and 'enabling standards' (involving organisational process and delivery standards). Kenny then goes on to say:

While a lot has been written about 'professional standards', there is little information on 'enabling standards' which refer to how an organisation or system should support, resource and value the work of the practitioners. The concept of 'enabling standards' supports the case for establishing an independent body to determine not only performance criteria for academics and institutions, but also for appropriate and independently determined funding standards for higher education, which would also remove the issue of resourcing higher education from the political arena and provide an objective measure against which to gauge the performance of government.

While there are performance processes for most senior institutional managers, there are problems around the paradigm under which the performance indicators are set, criteria used and who makes the judgements. The argument is that, to be effective, the performance management process has to encourage and reward the behaviour it values.

An effective performance management process for executives needs to reflect and value their role as facilitators of change in complex modern organisations. Judgements of their performance need to be based on the effectiveness of the structures and processes they set-up within an organisation. The criteria should include how well they facilitate real discussion, debate, inclusion and dialogue in their organisation. A new and more complex role has emerged for senior managers, which is less about controlling outcomes and more about dealing effectively with complexity and ambiguity.

Quality education and research outcomes cannot be mandated by government or university management. Instead they result from a partnership which includes all the key stakeholders. Currently academics have little input into how well institutions perform and are feeling the pressure of increased workloads and lower remuneration. Through greater collegiality, academics legitimately need to find their own voice in tertiary organisations and express their own unique perspective in setting the policy agenda for higher education.

Effective managers in the modern economic climate must focus on organisational learning and design processes and systems that enable and value involvement by all stakeholders and empower staff. They will also see themselves as accountable for objectively determined enabling standards which facilitate full participation in decision making and ensure adequate resourcing is available for academic staff to do their jobs well.

Academics cannot be held solely responsible for the quality of teaching and research at their university. They operate within the resource and policy constraints created by the government and senior managers of universities. Recognition of the value and validity associated with the different the roles of all the stakeholders groups and appropriate mechanisms to enable each to contribute according to their strengths, is essential if universities are to meet the challenges of the modern era.

* Dr John Kenny lectures in the bachelor of teaching and bachelor of education programs at the University of Tasmania.

** Dr Ian Dobson has been appointed editor of Australian Universities Review. Under a new ranking system released by the Australian Research Council last month, the AUR received a B ranking but Dobson says he intends to work to have it elevated to A. He is also editor of the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, which was ranked in the A category.