Analytic Quality Glossary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Citation reference: Harvey, L., 2004–8, Analytic Quality Glossary, Quality Research International, http://www.qualityresearchinternational.com/glossary/
This is a dynamic glossary and the author would welcome any e-mail suggestions for amendments or additions.
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Accountability
core definition
Accountability
is the requirement, when undertaking an activity, to expressly address the
concerns, requirements or perspectives of others.
explanatory context
Accountability
has, since the 1990s been a widely used term linked to mall public service,
including higher education. It is seen a major purpose of external quality
processes. However, it is a term that is rarely explicitly defined in the
literature.
analytical review
On-line
dictionaries state that:
Accountability is responsibility to someone or for some activity. (Freedictionary)
In the higher
education context, responsibility is to a range of stakeholders, although being
held to account for expenditure of public money predominates in most
elaborations of accountability.
Accountability: The assurance of a
unit to its stakeholders that it provides education of good quality. (Cambell & Rozsnyai, 2002)
Accountability is
defined as demonstrating the worth and use of public resources. Higher education in most countries has been
faced with greater demands to demonstrate its worth and to account for its use
of public resources, partly as a result of fierce competition for tightened
state funds and partly as a result of other restructuring taking place
throughout the public sector. (Lewis et
al., 2001)
The PA Consulting(2000, p.6) study for HEFCE, in the
HEIs in England receive over £6 billion of public money a year for which they are held to account – via statutes (e.g. higher education and science and technology Acts), regulations (e.g. the financial memorandum between HEFCE and each HEI), and contracts (e.g. with Research Councils, the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) and the National Health Service (NHS)). The independent, self-governing status of HEIs does not absolve them from accountability for their use of public funding.
It goes on to
elaborate this but also point to other forms of accountability:
In the words of the Nolan Committee: “Wherever a citizen receives a service which is paid for wholly or in part by the taxpayer, then the government must retain appropriate responsibility for safeguarding the interests of both users and taxpayers, regardless of the status of the service provider”. Accountability in this context refers to the purposes for which public money is voted by Parliament, and the conditions under which institutions receive public funding. These purposes and conditions are embodied in the relevant statutes, regulations and contracts. Responsibility for assuring them is vested in the Accounting Officer chain, which extends from the Permanent Secretary of the sponsoring government departments via the Chief Executive of the relevant spending agencies (HEFCE, TTA, the Research Councils, etc.) to the designated Principal Officer, usually the Vice Chancellor or Principal, of each HEI. But accountability expectations increasingly go beyond this fiduciary compliance to include the achievement of Government policy objectives, even when the service providers, namely the HEIs, are constitutionally independent of Government. The Government has placed increasing emphasis on securing specified outputs and outcomes from publicly funded activities in response to community expectations about improving service quality and policy effectiveness. This is reflected in output-based funding models and increasing attention to outcome-based performance targets. (PA Consulting, 2000, p. 10).
This financial underpinning is mediated in some
settings to encompass governance rather than specifically value for tax-payers
money:
Accountability: A public or private organisation must be accountable to the organisation and to society in general to ensure good governance. This means that information about set goals that have been achieved and how they have been achieved should be transparent. Universities, as public organisations, also work to establish the appropriate mechanisms to make themselves accountable to their sector and to citizens. (CPUR, 2003, p. 1)
In some settings, accountability is closely
linked to performance evaluation:
Accountability implies the assessment of performance, the public communication of information about performance, and the potential for sanctions or rewards. Combining these words leads quickly to questions about content, power relationships, and legitimacy in educational accountability. At the outset one must ask, who is accountable, for what, and to whom? Then, are the goals and standards appropriate, are the measurements of performance valid and reliable, do those seeking to hold others accountable have legitimate expertise and authority? (NCAHE, 2004)
An alternative view relates accountability to collective responsibility:
accountability [in education] is defined as: the
assurance that all education stakeholders accept responsibility and hold
themselves and each other responsible for every learner having full access to
quality education, qualified teachers, challenging curriculum, full opportunity
to learn, and appropriate, sufficient support for learning so they can achieve
at excellent levels in academic and other student outcomes.
By implication in this
definition, where the system and those who are responsible for it fail the
learner, they also share the blame. No one group of stakeholders can point the
finger of blame at any other. All
stakeholders bear the responsibility for student school success and the
blame when students are not successful. (IDRA, 2002)
A Canadian
definition links accountability to public rather than private responsibility
Accountability is defined as the degree to which provincial governments ensure that universities and colleges are in fact accountable to the public, and not to corporations or individual sponsors or clients. In addition, it means that universities and colleges, and their functions of teaching, research and community service remain in the public domain and are not privatized. This is determined largely by the amount of public funding dedicated to post-secondary education budgets, as compared to funding from private donations or student fees, which download the cost of education to individuals. (Doherty-Delorme and Shaker, 2001, p. 9)
Wojtczak (2002) defines accountability in the context of medical education as:
Responsibility for the decisions
and capability to explain to others or the public all undertaken activities to
carry out what was obliged to do; to ensure reaching or making progress towards
planned objectives or targets.
associated issues
The reasons for
accountability include the cost and potential problems of massification,
the concomitant need to account for increasing amounts of public money, the
need to ensure value for both private and public monies, lack of clear lines of
accountability within higher education systems, globalisation and the need to
keep control of a increasingly unrestricted market (
the ultimate purposes of accountability systems [is] to improve performance, to assure quality, to sustain confidence.
Functions of accountability
Accountability
has five main functions.
The first function
of accountability is, via external evaluations,
to ensure that the institution or programme is accountable to appropriate
stakeholders such as the government (on
behalf of tax payer), professions, employers
and students. Often there is a clear concern to ensure that public money is
spent appropriately — in short, to ensure value for money of teaching and learning, research,
resources and management. Research assessment exercises
and assessment of teacing and learning,
along with statistical data on student progression and achievement and graduate
employment have inter alia been used as accountability measures, or performance indicators.
A second
accountability function is to ensure that that principles and practices within
higher education are not being eroded or flouted. This form of accountability
is mainly used to control the development of
private providers but can be used to ensure that public providers do not become
lax. Accreditation, audit, assessment and
standards monitoring all have a
role to play here.
Third, is
accountability to students that the programme is organised and run properly and
that and appropriate educational experience is both promised and delivered:
increasingly, in some countries, that they are getting value for the money they are personally
investing. This overlaps with assessments that attempt to monitor service
quality.
A fourth
accountability purpose of quality evaluation procedures is the generation of public information about the quality of institutions and programmes. This is both information for funders,
which can be used, for example, to aid funding allocation decisions and
information for users (such as prospective students and graduate recruiters)
that supposedly helps inform choice.
A fifth,
accountability purpose is to use quality evaluation as a vehicle to achieve compliance. Evaluation encourages compliance to
(emerging or existing) government policy or to the preferences or policy of
stakeholders such as professional bodies and employer lobbies. Government is
usually the most important and powerful of these for higher education because
it supplies so much of the money and in many cases controls the licensing of institutions. Governments around the
world are looking for higher education to be more responsive. This includes
responding to value-for-money
imperatives, making higher education more relevant to social and economic
needs, widening access to higher education and
expanding numbers, usually in the face of decreasing unit cost. In addition
there is pressure to ensure comparability of provision and procedures, within
and between institutions, including international comparisons (
Accountability and
improvement
A second key issue that has been around for a decade is the relationship
between accountability and improvement.
Some people involved in quality assurance have argues that although at time
conflicting the two aspects can be resolved, even within the same organisation.
Indeed, many systems of quality evaluation, accreditation, audit, assessment
attempt to be accountable while advocating improvement.
The issues, though remain. The tension between accountability and continuous quality improvement was pointed out by Vroeijenstijn and Acherman (1990). Arguably, accountability is about value for money and fitness for purpose , while continuous improvement in teaching and learning is about enhancement of the student experience, and empowering students as life-long learners.
The accountability-led view sees improvement as a secondary function of the monitoring process. Such an approach argues that a process of external monitoring of quality, ostensibly for purposes of accountability, is likely to lead to improvement as a side effect. Requiring accountability, it is assumed, will lead to a review of practices, which in turn will result in improvement.
However, this has been questioned on three grounds:
First, it is likely that, faced with a monitoring system that demands accountability, academics will comply with requirements in such a way as to minimize disruption to their existing academic practices.
Second, where accountability requires the production of strategic plans, clear objectives, quality assurance systems, and so on, then there may be an initial impetus towards quality improvement. However, there is little evidence to suggest a sustained momentum as a result of this initial push. Accountability systems, in short, are unlikely to lead to a process of continuous quality improvement. The argument is that improvement comes from a changed culture and local ownership, which compliance processes do not encourage.
Third, accountability approaches
tend to demotivate staff who are
already involved in innovation and quality initiatives. Not only do they face
the added burden of responding to external scrutiny there is also a feeling of
being manipulated, of not being trusted or valued, by managers and outside
agencies (
related terms
sources
Campbell, C. & Rozsnyai,
C., 2002, Quality Assurance and the
Development of Course Programmes. Papers on Higher
Doherty-Delorme, D. and Shaker, E., 2001, Missing Pieces II An Alternative Guide To Canadian Post-Secondary Education. 2000/2001 Provincial Rankings: Where Do the Provinces Stand on Education? January, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/pub4.html
Freedictionary.com, 2004, ‘Accountability’, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/accountability
Harvey,
L., 2002, ‘Quality assurance in higher education: some international trends’ Higher
Education Conference,
Intercultural
Development Research Association (IRDA), 2002, IDRA Newsletter, May 2002 http://www.idra.org/Newslttr/2002/May/Bradley.htm
Lewis, D.R, Ikeda, T. and Dundar, H., 2001, ‘On the use of performance indicators in
National Commission on Accountability in
Higher Education (NCAHE), 2004, Overview, State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) http://www.sheeo.org/account/comm-home.htm,
undated accessed October 2004.
PA Consulting ,
2000, Better accountability for higher
education: Summary of a review for the HEFCE, Report August 00/36.
Wojtczak, A., 2002, Glossary of Medical
Education Terms, http://www.iime.org/glossary.htm,
December, 2000, Revised February 2002