Monday 23rd January

Tags and mystery shopping

“Why are colleges and universities obsessed with the wrong type of management?”

David – London College of Fashion (university of the Arts)


In one paper a few days ago I mentioned one major university that now requires its academic staff to carry mobile phones on which they are contactable at any time with “spot checks” by two named members of staff to make sure staff are where they say they are.

In the same week came news of the new wheeze of “mystery shopping exercises” in which external consultants are paid to test how well lecturers and academic related staff handle “customer relations”.

This high class “tagging”,of course, does nothing to improve the quality of teaching or research but it is symptomatic of a low trust management culture more appropriate to a baked bean factory than to an institution of learning.

Across post-16 education, instead of staff being an asset to be trusted, our members have become a cost to be inspected, audited, assessed, “mystery shopped” and tagged. The less we are valued, the more we are measured. Often by chief executives who know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.

There are two main drivers for these misguided attempts to improve “efficiency”.

The first is the Government’s obsession with competition linked to “value for money” which finds its clearest expression in league tables. Unfortunately what is often measured is a narrow form of efficiency, not effectiveness, and no account is taken of the perverse incentives such measurement and competition creates.

The second driver is an attempt to drive up productivity and tighten management control of staff by increasingly managing in a prescriptive manner, whether or not such a management culture actually motives staff or improve the quality of teaching, research or support to staff and students.

The entry of Fordism into academia is generally accompanied by exhortations to staff to “GET REAL”. However the reality we are invited to immerse ourselves in is one in which the curriculum narrows, professional autonomy contracts and governance and accountability become even more opaque.

It is not enough for us to react to these pressures. Underpinned by an understanding of what is happening we need to articulate our own “reality” of education to counter to this increasingly impoverished one.

A major challenge for the new UCU General Secretary will be to help link up with the myriad of groups and campaigns wishing to defend education as a public good and ensure that its governance and management culture are appropriate to that mission.

I’ll be speaking on this theme at the London College of Fashion on Monday 12th February

Quote of the day

‘’You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today’’

Abraham Lincoln