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Quality in business education
Welcome to the main resource for the QuBE project. We are six university business schools working with national quality bodies to improve the management of quality in business education in the UK.
What's up
The QuBE Manifesto
Our manifesto: It's time to act! The
QuBE partners have distilled their findings and recommendations into a
simple six-page 'manifesto' which can help you to make a difference to
your University's quality management. The Manifesto tackles key
problems and presents a description of the lesson learned, our
recommendations and links to supporting resources – including tools,
case studies, models and analysis.
Tools
Dean's
Dilemma highlighted: Faculty decision-making is never simple, but a
new QuBE tool can make it a learning experience. The Dean's Dilemma is
a board game where senior managers try to solve typical operational
problems in a way that respects and reinforces the institution’s
quality policy. Find out more in the tools
section of the QuBE Toolbox.
Time to check your bearings: if you want to develop your quality management you need to know where you are now. Our 'roadmap' can help you find out where you are and where you need to go. Check it out and tell us what you think.
Get the dialogue started with a new
tool from Clive Holtham that will get management teams talking
about the priorities for your business school.
At last: a reason to read those minutes.
Mike Hart and David Rush have created a simple and surprisingly
effective way of sensitising academic staff and school managers to what
their students need. The 'minutes tool' really works.
Provocations
Who needs the vice-chancellor's vote? Quality management in UK higher education accepts the conventional view from industry that QM must be enterprise-wide, and driven by enthusiasm and understanding at the top. Noted quality commentator Lee Harvey says 'at heart, the British system of quality monitoring failed to engage with transformative learning and teaching'; QuBE's research reinforces this conclusion. But there is another way, say QuBE researchers Mike Hart and David Rush, whose short article 'Transformative quality for business schools' suggests that bottom-up methods could make a difference in the department or school.
There are more speculative and provocative pieces in the Thinkpieces section of the
Toolbox.
During the project we found:
- patchy improvement was driven by the need to 'tick the boxes' of simple quality-control systems rather than by the desire to improve the student experience.
- many business schools needed to improve to reach satisfactory quality management; the leading schools were striding towards extraordinary quality achievement.
- many schools didn't follow through: they collected data which should have helped them recognise and correct problems, but didn't use that data to see and solve their own problems. School and institution managements lacked commitment and stamina.
We studied business education, working with everyone involved to
identify best practice, then spreading lessons, methods & tools
to
- teachers
- learners
- university managers
- employers
- quality management professionals.
The methods and tools that we have made are summarised for you in the QuBE Quality Roadmap, and the key lessons we want to share with you are crystallised in the QuBE Manifesto.
A toolbox for quality in higher education
We have assembled a toolbox of research, diagnostics, case studies, provocations and inspirations to help professionals in higher education improve their understanding, control and management of the quality of your courses and modules.
Research reports on quality and excellence in UK business schools
The QuBE project partners created a number of research reports on aspects of quality management in higher education. To help you get the most from the work, we've extracted 'soundbites' and results 'nuggets', together with research summaries, and we've posted full papers where possible.