How did I miss service teaching as one of the potential pitfalls?
Although not your successor Malcolm, I can guess which institutions the
examples apply to!
The Maths argument still bubbles up regularly at Birmingham. The financial
position of the School becomes very interesting if they do not carry out
service teaching for engineers and scientists.
Interestingly, these arguments haven't occurred w.r.t. language teaching.
This is probably because students from many disciplines take language
options and aren't concentrated in particular Schools.
I have not come across the other case of a premium demand for carrying out
service teaching. But this is possibly because despite devolved budgeting,
Schools don't truly understand our RAM, and aren't necessarily that
powerful.
Birmingham has not exercised the arguments for divergence from the HEFCE
methodology for many years (and definitely not in my relatively short time
here), but there are sounds reasons as Malcolm states. A favourite saying
of mine is that "the policy drives the model, not the model driving the
policy". We have at times come close to tweaking the model without having
a sound policy reason for doing so, yet give me a policy and I'm sure that
we could build it into a resource mechanism.
It looks as though Mike and Nigel have volunteered themselves to develop
something for AUA conf. See you there!
On 13 Jun 01, at 12:59, Malcolm Edwards wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> We're not sufficiently far down the line yet to start noticing pitfalls at
> Cambridge, but here are two that I've come across in previous institutions.
> They both relate to service teaching. (I hope that they wont be recognised by
> anyone other than my sucessors in those jobs!)
>
> First: teaching maths to engineers. In one institution, there was reasonably
> broad acceptance of the idea that, on academic grounds, maths should be taught
> by mathematicians, who, for reasons of research 'critical mass' should be
> employed in the mathematics department (there were some agreed exceptions to
> this rule of thumb). Since the model had to implement agreed academic
> strategy, we clearly had to come up with a way of encouraging departments such
> as engineering to 'franchise out' their maths FTEs to maths. However, if you
> follow the HEFCE methodology then, depending on how far you break departments
> down into different cost centres, you find that maths taught by someone in an
> engineering department is likely to be returned to an engineering cost centre,
> and so be resourced at the engineering level. If we accept the argument
> underlying the HEFCE T methodology, then maths is cheaper to teach than
> engineering. So, by employing a mathematician 'in house' to do their maths
> teaching, the engineers are able to make a profit on their HEFCE T funding
> (income at Band B, but costs more similar to Band C). Two possible solutions:
> either control such issues outside of the RAM, through an academic policy
> committee (since the RAM is not a panacea); or fund by subject of study rather
> than cost centre: then the decision whether to frnachise out or not is budget
> neutral.
>
> Second: teaching management to engineers. School of Management find it more
> rewarding to teach their own students than to teach engineers. Consequently,
> they demand a premium (e.g. they say that they want to receive band B funding,
> since the students are engineers). Clearly, they dont understand how cost
> centres work (they do now!). But in a highly devolved institution, where
> Schools are very powerful, is there not some merit to their argument? Ought
> the two Schools to be allowed to argue a transfer rate between themselves? (I
> am not necessarily persuaded that they ought, but it is food for thought.)
>
> In both cases, I think that a large part of the answer is that we should not
> be afraid to use the freedom that we are given to apply HEFCE funds in the way
> that we deem appropriate to institutional strategy, i.e. not necessarily in
> accordance with the formula by which HEFCE determine our standard resource. In
> this first case, by funding by subject not cost centre; in the second, by
> adjusting the HEFCE weightings if this is agreeable to those concerned. I
> think that it is of crucial importance that RAMs should reflect, and be a tool
> for the implementation of, University strategy. And since the HEFCE model does
> not include a direct link between activity and income (those extra students
> just take you out of the tolerance band!), I have always found it possible to
> persuade the relevant committees to diverge from the HEFCE methodology and
> weightings (to greater or lesser extents) when designing local RAMs.
>
> Malcolm Edwards
>
> Malcolm S Edwards MA STM PhD,
> Assistant Registrary,
> General Board Division,
> University Offices,
> The Old Schools,
> Trinity Lane,
> Cambridge CB2 1TT
>
> Telephone 01223 339665
--
Dr Dave Radcliffe
Planning Officer
Planning & Policy Development
Academic Office
Tel: 0121 414 3753
Web: http://www.ao.bham.ac.uk/plan/
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