Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal February 2004 Volume 2 (1)

Further Education resources

Selecting the right tools

Catherine Kearney tracks the development of the new Toolkit for quality resource provision in the FE sector, and explains what it means in practice.

Last November Resources and Services Supporting Learning: A service development quality toolkit was launched to the Further Education sector. As the largest provider of lifelong learning in Scotland, further education colleges are key players in the delivery of the Scottish Executive’s strategy in this area. Forty six colleges share half a million enrolments each year and offer a wide range of education opportunities including National Qualifications, Higher National Courses and Diplomas (HNC and HND) SVQs and specialist courses. College libraries/learning resource centres are central to the student experience.

The toolkit was the outcome of a six-month project, funded by the Scottish Further Education Funding Council (SFEFC), supported by SLIC, and led by the Glasgow Colleges Consortium. Its aim was to develop self-evaluative indicators for college library services. It came about as a result of attempts to update the 1997 SLIC guidance document Libraries in Scottish Further Education Colleges: Standards for Performance and Resourcing. Those standards, while still relevant in some areas, had become very outdated in relation to rapid technological change in colleges. Since 1997, ICT had become a strategic issue in further education and the inspection framework had evolved into a self-evaluative quality assurance model.

Between 1999 and 2002 the SFEFC highlighted the strategic importance of ICT by investing £29m in colleges to make major improvements to the ICT infrastructure. This included JISC membership for all colleges, high bandwidth connections (34-100Mbs), help with content development and the introduction of ICT service standards (Bootstrap). Colleges were encouraged to invest in virtual learning environments (VLEs) and required to submit ICT strategies to the Funding Council.

In late 2002 the SFEFC put out a call for bids to extend self-evaluation. Following the successful Bootstrap Project the Council offered funding for collaborative bids from other college support services to:

• Create service standards derived from practitioner discussion and best practice
• Create grade indicators for each standard
• Produce support materials and make them freely available to the sector.

A bid from the ten Glasgow colleges supported by SLIC and JISC RSC-SW was accepted in early 2003 with Glasgow College of Building and Printing as the lead college. As their contribution to the project, SLIC funded my secondment from the post of Director of Library and Learning Services at Glasgow College of Building and Printing to project manage the work and provide assistance and guidance to the consortium.

Two groups were established to assist with the project: Firstly, an Advisory Group was set up with cross sectoral membership. It was chaired by the Convener of the SFEU Quality Improvement Forum and attended by key personnel from colleges and other agencies. These were myself as Project Manager and Chair of the Glasgow Colleges Library Group, Eric Simpson from Anniesland College who had been a member of the 1997 Standards working party, Tom McMaster from Lauder College and Carole Gray from Dundee College both FE representatives on SLIC Management Committee. David Beards, from SFEFC represented the Funding Council until his promotion moved him to other duties and he was replaced by the equally capable Caroline Hastings. JISC was represented by Fionnuala Cassidy, Training and Outreach Officer at JISC RSC-SW, Alan Watt HMIe attended on behalf of the Inspectorate, Ian Manderson, Policy Executive, from the Education and Lifelong Learning Department kept a watching brief on developments for his department, Catherine Nicholson, Development Director of SCURL ensured cross sectoral representation, Jean Henderson from SFEU represented the Librarians Network and Craig Green, former Network Manager for the Glasgow Telecolleges Network acted as Technical Advisor to the Group.

This Group met once every six weeks during the life of the project. The second group to be established was a practitioners group from colleges across Scotland who offered their assistance and expertise in three practitioner workshops which took place over a total of five days during the project.

Twelve colleges were involved in this important work and some crossover existed between the Advisory Group and practitioners to ensure consistency. Practitioners included Karen McNeill from Barony College, Kathy Christie from Borders College, Anette Guthrie from Dumfries and Galloway, Caroline Cochrane from GCBP, Laura Thompson from John Wheatley College, Angie McKenzie from Moray College, Jennifer Louden from Perth College, Stephen Grant from Reid Kerr College and Linda Hartley from West Lothian. Through the further education Jiscmail service assistance and advice was received from all areas of Scotland. In total, by the end of the project around half of the colleges in Scotland had contributed in some way to the outcomes of the project.

During the life of the project practitioners had been tasked to produce:

• A set of quality indicators
• A set of grade illustrations
• Support materials

However, this was a group who consistently punched above their weight in terms of outcomes and as a result by the end of the project the practitioners had:

• Created a web archive hosted on SLAINTE, for project material
• Drafted a high level grade indicator for consideration by HMIe in their review of the current framework
• Produced a considered and thoughtful response to the Funding Council’s consultation Quality the way forward on redesigning the HMIe review framework
• Delivered a commentary on the joint funding councils E-learning Report highlighting the role of library and information services in supporting students online.
• Published three journal articles on progress
• Organised a ‘first’ for the sector when we held an ‘Ask a HMIe’ event. An audience of librarians and quality managers had a unique opportunity to question a panel of HMIe and associate assessors on the review framework.

At the end of the six-month project plan, the Group published a 36-page guidance document – The Toolkit – which included seven quality indicators and associated grade illustrations. The Toolkit is freely available from SLAINTE (www.slainte.org.uk) and the indicators have generated UK-wide interest.

So what do the seven indicators cover?

1. Learning Resource Organisation. This looks at how to effect shared services – not simply technical interoperability but also involvement in resource sharing initiatives which better meet learner needs for information access
2. Staffing. In common with other college support service frameworks there is a section on staffing which restates the value of professional qualifications and links staff development priorities to college ICT strategies and development plans.
3. ICT Integration. ICT has become a strategic issue in colleges and this section is about making sure that libraries and information services are fully integrated with other college systems. It encourages the use of robust metadata standards to enable the interface between the library and VLE.
4. User support. Managers are asked to consider how the service combines staff provision, ICT availability and a mix of learning resources to make the whole service appropriate to learners needs.
5. Accessibility. The theme of access is continued in a section which invites colleges to consider how to extend services beyond the college campus to encourage flexibility of use.
6. Inclusiveness. Recent legislation is addressed in this section which looks at the library service obligations with regard to special needs and diversity issues.
7. Quality Assurance and Improvement. The final section draws all of the indicators together in a whole college context.

Advice on use of the Toolkit is available from SLIC and we hope service managers will use the Toolkit to:

• Judge quality of performance against a set of criteria
• Identify development needs and priorities
• Highlight best practice
• Identify patterns of service strength and weakness
• Develop service improvement action plans

SLIC is working with practitioners to implement the Toolkit and design training opportunities to support its use by colleges. SLIC has undertaken to review the indicators periodically to ensure they remain relevant.

Information

Further information on the contents of the Toolkit: Catherine Kearney Assistant Director SLIC/CILIPS c.kearney@slainte.org.uk

Information Scotland Vol. 2 (1) February 2004

Information Scotland is delivered online by the SAPIENS electronic publishing service based at the Centre for Digital Library Research. SLAINTE (Scottish libraries across the Internet) offers further information about librarianship and information management in Scotland.