NELSON IGNORES EXPERT ADVICE ON UNIVERSITY TEACHING PERFORMANCE INDICATORS
August 12, 2005
In developing the ranking system used to measure teaching performance at Australia’s 38 publicly funded universities, the Federal Education Minister has completely ignored expert advice commissioned by his own Department that the Performance Indicators they were using were flawed, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) said on Friday.
The Minister, Dr Brendan Nelson, recently released details of the funding model to be used as the basis for allocating $250 million to Australian universities through the Learning and Teaching Performance Fund over three years commencing in 2006.
The controversial ranking system, the outcomes of which were reported in the Australian newspaper today, and the as yet to be announced funding allocations attached to them are based on selected Performance Indicators published by the Department of Education Science and Training (DEST).
“In using DEST Performance Indicators as the basis for allocating over $250 million to universities through the Fund, Minister Nelson is ignoring the expert advice he commissioned, which found that the Performance Indicators were unsatisfactory”, said Paul Kniest, NTEU Policy and Research Officer.
“The NTEU would question why the Minister, who properly insists that universities are fully accountable for their use of Government funds, is not prepared to apply the same standards to his own portfolio, and insists on allocating a quarter of a billion dollars on the basis of indicators that his own commissioned research finds to be fundamentally flawed,” Kniest said.
“The Minister commissioned Access Economics to review the DEST Performance Indicators for Universities. The results, which were released in July, concluded amongst other things that there are numerous areas in which the DEST methodology is unsatisfactory.[1]”
“The Access Economics review finds that there are major technical flaws in the way DEST currently constructs its Performance Indicator measures and suggests that further investigation and analysis is required before any statistically reliable or robust conclusions can be drawn about the relative teaching and learning performance of Australian universities.”
“The review is particularly critical of the use of Course Evaluation and Graduate Destination data, which form the basis of the new allocation model, because of inconsistencies in the way the data is collected, including the use of manufactured data, and analysed by different universities,” Kniest concluded.
For more information and comment contact:
Paul Kniest, Policy and Research Officer: (03) 9254 1910[1] Review of Higher Education Outcome Performance Indicators, Report by Access Economics for the Department of Education, Science and Training, piv, http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/higher_education/policy_issues_reviews/key_issues/learning_teaching/ltpf/default.htm#Issues_Paper