One of the common complaint about accreditation everywhere is that it creates a compliance culture i.e. higher education providers, by and large, try to show that they meet the minimum standards. While meeting minimum requirement is necessary to ensure a baseline quality of learning, it is not intended to be the final quality goal of the higher education providers. So, quality assurance agencies are urged to focus on enhancement or innovation. The Thai QA body, ONESQA has revamped its institutional accreditation into a enhancement -based review; the Indonesian national QA body - BAN-PT has since 2017 introduced a new accreditation system with the express aim of fomenting a quality culture; QAA, UK has revised its Quality Code and institutional review to focus more on enhancement much like its Scottish practice and the Malaysian QA body, MQA's compliance to minimum standards require substantial capacity for internal reviews and agility. Even ENQA and AQAN which are regional bodies supporting national QA agencies, have enshrined the quality culture imperative in their ESG and AQAF frameworks respectively. A quality culture is widely and long believed to underpin the enhancement orientation among providers.
What is this thing called quality culture? How do higher education providers develop it? How can quality assurance agencies (QAA) assess it? Quality culture refers to a value system of an institution where leadership consistently shows commitment to meeting high standards of performance and continual improvements through a quality management system which balances the need for stability and change based on feedback and feedforward from multiple stakeholders. Such a quality management system encourages openness and transparency through participation, consultation and innovation of staff, students, graduates, alumni, employers, experts, regulators etc. to improve effectiveness of teaching, learning, research and community service.
How do higher education providers nurture it? It starts with enlightened leadership which is committed to setting and meeting competitive standards in delivering their mission. It supports the high quality learning by allocating adequate resources. The leadership demands accountability for outcomes at all levels in the organisation. It balances the twin need for control and flexibility of operations by investing in its people.
So how do QAA's assess the culture? Culture is about shared values which is unseen but discernable. The manifestations of the underlying culture is assessable. There is strong top management commitment to maintaining and improving the quality of learning provided. This is seen via clear policies, systems and processes which define and direct operations and behavior with a clear focus on effectiveness - outcome achievement. There is a strong expectation that all processes are monitored, reviewed, and improved. The system shows capacity to objectively self-evaluate and engender changes to address weaknesses and to built on the strengths.
A multitude of indicators can be identified to collectively offer insight into the quality culture. Judging unseen values from empirically observable policies, structures, practices and processes is not an exact science. However, trained assessors can sort out compliance or enhancement orientation among providers.