I am aware, and we've listened to stakeholders' concerns regarding proposals to introduce a single quality assessment body. As I said, we recognise that stakeholders are broadly content with the current situation with regard to Estyn and QAA. So, we've been listening to that, following the technical consultation, and policy officials are working through options in regard to ensuring what quality assurance will look like in the commission. As I said, I don't want to pre-empt bringing forward the legislation, but the principles underlying any assurance regime would need to be coherent, need to be effective and need to be comprehensive. What we're also very clear about, and I think it is important to say, is that any quality framework covering higher education will be compatible with ENQA, which I think is really, really important going forward. And by an extension of that, it would be compatible with current UK-wide baseline standards. So, we don't want to create specific problems for the HE sector in Wales.
But, you have touched on this, there is substantial concern in the sector about this offer to move to one assurance body for the tertiary sector. One vice-chancellor has told us:
Well, sometimes, I think it is necessary, maybe, to cause a stir. If we don't change things, it does beg the point of, 'Why are any of us here if we're not here to sometimes move things forward?' And change is challenging always, but I would like to reassure all of our vice-chancellors and our sector as a whole that we're not going to do anything in the quality assurance regime that would risk what is the very high reputation and standards that Welsh universities currently comply with or would set them apart from institutions across the border or in a European context. Huw.
I agree, obviously. I think the fear is misplaced, but coming back to another theme in the conversation so far about futureproofing, what we're seeing in the figures that the Minister outlined to you earlier about the growth in postgraduate and the growth in part-time is the desire of a greater number of people at different ages to engage in higher and tertiary education, and quite often that will be in a workplace or it will be in a non-conventional institutional setting. Historically, the quality assurance regimes for work-based learning have tended to sit with Estyn; the assurance regimes for the universities have sat with the QAA. There's quite a lot of learning that all sides have got to engage in if we're going to be able to have continued high quality in these new areas that are being explored. That's an issue not just in Wales. The Augar report, which was published earlier this year in England, drew attention to this as being a major problem in the relationship over the border between Ofsted and the QAA. So, I think we're not looking to impose one institution on anybody, but we are looking to encourage greater synergy in the ways in which quality assurance and enhancement is undertaken in those different areas of activity.