Do we need more customer focus in university education?

I have to say I speak out of ignorance - or, at least, an absence of firm data and inside knowledge - on the topic that I raise today in this post.  On the other hand, we may fairly retort, this hasn't stopped me from writing in the past.

Which is true.

Recent events, however, even so, have brought me to consider that as always politicians will prefer to deal with the most easily measurable matters before they deal with the most useful ones.  Whilst there was a big hoo-hah last year - and quite rightly so - on the tuition fee disgrace that was the transfer from students to both the banking industry and universities of yet more profit and business, little attention was placed on the matter of what all that money was supposed to be purchasing.

I mean, of course, the university teaching itself.

And whilst the government has recently announced plans to fire underperforming teachers, I'm not sure this is aimed at affecting precisely the sector (that is to say, the universities) where the direct customer (that is to say, the student) not only pays upfront but also pays the most.

My experience of university education was relatively benign.  I wasn't a particularly applied student but did thoroughly enjoy my three years at Warwick where I studied Film & Literature.  I managed to get a 2(i), probably due mainly to the results of my third year Creative Writing module under the inspiring Andrew Davies.  And the different elements of the course - film on the one hand and literary studies on the other - were well coordinated and structured.

The course influenced the rest of my life.  For better or worse, it changed me most profoundly.

Not long ago, however, I had the opportunity to talk to a student currently at a university in the North West of England.  This student seemed unhappy for a number of reasons.  Two appeared to be at the top of the list: first, the university teachers had been utterly unresponsive to the feedback the student had given about the level in which he had been situated at the beginning of the first year, an error of judgement on the part of the professionals the implications of which became compounded in the first semester of the second year - and apparently led to a reactive depression on the part of the student.

Second, and perhaps much more revealingly, in what is now clearly a consumer-driven and consumer-structured society, he felt - and, indeed, feels - that he wasn't getting his money's worth, his value for money, from the style, substance and take-it-or-leave-it attitude of the vast majority of his teachers.

Over the past decade or so, an enormous amount of work has gone into improving the quality of compulsory education: from inspection regimes to teacher-training; from school infrastructures to cross-curricular subjects ... all these items and far far more out there have helped to radically re-engineer the compulsory education system in the UK.  Yet, from my unpractised and looking-in-from-the-outside eye, it would seem very little has been done to track the behaviours, efficacy, pedagogical worth and consumer focus of university teaching - precisely the teaching, in fact, where the link between payer and payee would be easiest to establish, forge, develop and take advantage of.

So I do wonder as the government continues to fill the pockets of its sponsors in universities and the financial services sector, and at the expense I might say of the students, why it doesn't place as much emphasis on improving the teaching standards in higher education as it clearly wants to do for the rest.

I'm not saying we should go as far as to be able to fire a university lecturer in a term - for the relationship between lecturer, teaching and research is far more complex than compulsory education has to date been able to contemplate; but I do wonder if it isn't time for university lecturers and their teaching behaviours to come under the microscope of an institution with absolutely similar criteria to those a rejuvenated Ofsted might wish to contemplate.

And at the very least begin to create a shared university mindset which sees the student as a customer with the right to the very best pedagogical systems in the world - especially where in some cases they are being obliged to pay a very 21st century £30,000 for the often dubious honour of a 19th century kind of tuition.