The institute had extensive partnerships abroad – in Ireland Spain India and Greece – though its operations in the

The institute had extensive partnerships abroad – in Ireland, Spain, India and Greece – though its operations in the latter two countries have ceased. Its activities in Athens ended following concern about misleading advertising and unusual funding arrangements.At first the institute was franchising courses via a private Greek college and was paid in cash stuffed into envelopes and brought through customs. “We didn’t want to bring money into this country in envelopes,” said a spokesman. “We sought advice from banks and various bodies and they said this was an acceptable way of doing things. The person we were dealing with insisted on paying us that way.”When that relationship was terminated in 1995 the institute set up its own base in Athens.

But that came under fire from the HEQC for the way it was being marketed. Advertisements for courses at the Athens campus were not seen by the head of marketing in England and eyebrows were raised about the use of the term “Southampton Solent Campus”, given that Southampton is a higher education institute not a university. The HEQC concluded: “These approaches to the promotion of overseas provision are not consistent with generally accepted best practice.” The institute is currently under investigation by the Higher Education Funding Counciln’Diplomas were being printed locally’Concern about the overseas activities of Swansea Institute for Higher Education began when external examiners reported that scripts for an MBA course taken by students in Malaysia were being marked more leniently than those written by students in Wales.The Higher Education Quality Council looked into the matter and concluded: “The institute appears to have allowed its overseas collaborative provision to develop separately from the quality assurance procedures and practices obtaining in programmes delivered in the UK.”Lecturers passed a vote of no confidence in the institute’s principal, Professor Gerald Stockdale After pressure from the governors he resigned. There followed a report from the National Audit Office which queried the 33 foreign trips which the principal had taken in the space of four years at a cost of pounds 65,000. The auditors also identified problems with planning, student registration and financial controls. There was poor control over the distribution of examination certificates. In Malaysia, 500 certificates for the postgraduate diploma in business management were printed locally.

This could have led to certificates being issued or sold locally without the institute’s knowledge, said the NAO.The institute fully accepted the report and agreed there had been insufficient control mechanisms. All weaknesses identified had been addressed, it said, and the institute had been reorganised. The institute is in the process of implementing the recommendations of the National Audit Office reportn. When the new government comes to put into practice its proposals for improving education, it should pause and ask itself why in the past so many apparently good ideas have gone awry.

Too often reforms conceived with the best of motives seem to produce the worst of results. A long trail of disappointment winds from nursery vouchers to the expansion of higher education

Sometimes it is the policy itself which is daft. The proper place for vouchers, for example, is in promoting lifelong learning, not in developing fundamental concepts in the young, which requires a consensual approach. More often, however, the policy is sound – comprehensive education, national curriculum and testing, vocational reform – but the outcome, at first at least, is disastrous.
On the basis that once may be happenstance, twice may be coincidence, but three times is enemy action, politicians have been inclined to conjure up a hostile educational establishment (which they have set about routing). But, more likely, they have been lulled into the comfortable assumption that their job is done when they settle on good policies. They therefore leave themselves vulnerable to at least three kinds of intervention: by the idiosyncratic, by the previously excluded, or by the inept.Policies often seem to go wrong through being hijacked by an idiosyncratic enthusiast or group of enthusiasts. The best recent example is vocational reform, where the very sensible wish to create a national framework was transformed into a fruitless game of “hunt the competence”.But there are many others.