At the moment many institutions are working on defining what approach should be taken to inclusive teaching and learning and in doing so are benchmarking their existing practice. It’s more difficult to get started with this than you’d imagine because there are no agreed ways of working in HE which are considered to be standard. In schools differentiation and some kind of agreed learning plan* are fairly standard but this is not the case in UK HE organisations.
One of the problems you might encounter when embarking on this work is that the terms used to describe such exercises seem to have become mixed up. The terms base-level, baseline and benchmark seem to be used interchangeably so it’s worth considering what you mean by these ideas.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking is normally about comparing something to an existing standard or practice. You might benchmark how a department is responding to supporting disabled students by comparing what goes on in another department which is seen as being particularly successful in this regard. In businesses this is often done to compare performance against other companies who are more successful, to identify areas for improvement. In terms of inclusive teaching and learning we would be looking at practices which are seen as exemplary, such as ensuring that the majority of the materials you are going to use in a lecture are available for students to peruse 24-48 hours in advance. Or ensuring that your handouts are as accessible as possible – making sure that the print is legible using a recommended font type and size (such as those without serifs printed in at least 12 pt).
Base-level provision
Where we seem to have got confused in HE inclusion circles (in the UK at least) is with notions of base level support. This is probably because of the 1994 base-level document which was commissioned by HEFCE and HEFCW. If you’re not familiar with this publication I would recommend that you have a look at it because it really did pave the way for a lot of provision in the UK: some of the suggestions are still not implemented in some HEPs 25 years later.
The foreward to this document is confusing to say the least: it says that they were intending to set out minimum standards and by doing that to set a benchmark for comparison. Perhaps the benchmark was very low at the time but the recommendations contained within are quite radical, even now.
The executive summary doesn’t really help to elucidate matters: it says that the provision outlined refers to the ‘minimum level of support that each HEI should provide.’ It then says that these provisions were not intended as statements of best practice because it was perceived that they could be improved on.
Well they were right about being able to use them as a benchmark against which to compare your practice at the time but would you want to benchmark against minimum standards? There is a possibility these confusions were being used as rhetorical devices as is often seen in policy documents: policies are interpretable in multiple ways. If you’re giving the benefit of the doubt to the policy writers they are intended so that localised implementation is afforded flexibility – the cynical amongst you would see them as a lack of understanding of a policy context.
Baseline
Somewhere along the journey base level seems to have got mixed up with baseline. Which is an exercise which many HEPs in the UK are engaged in currently. They are measuring the practice within academic departments to gain some kind of baseline measure of their provision so that they can show progress. The inclusive teaching, learning and assessment tool contained within these pages is an example of how you might go about that. With it I tried to create an iterative process because I was cautious of creating an exercise which is seen as imposing standards from on high (top down implementation). I also wanted to create some sort of continuous improvement process so that departments had room to develop provision and had ways in which to define their own subject specific good practice. Another way of doing this is to outline benchmarks which exist in the sector (they can be from across education) and ask departments to measure their own performance against these. In this way you are offering best practice which academic departments can aspire to.
Here’s some suggestions (with additional questions from me and from within the detail of the document) from the original base-level guidance which you could benchmark against.
Do you have a well-publicised system of outlining students’ learning support needs with target times for completion and a code of practice which outlines how these are circulated? How are these used by academic departments? Do all academic staff see them? Do they input into them?
Does your HEI provide services to reflect the agreed needs within these documents? Do learning support plans get implemented? Do they reflect existing academic practice? Are they reviewed sufficiently?
Is a member of senior management given an assigned role in the implementation of inclusive provision? Do they have a role in dealing with unresolved issues that might affect the organisation of academic provision?
The guidance is perhaps most famous (can policy guidance be famous?) within the UK HE sector for outlining ‘minimum’ levels of staffing. Does your institution provide the following dedicated disability officer staffing levels?
| Size of institution (students) | Full time equivalent posts |
| Up to 3,000 | 0.5 |
| 5,000 | 1.0 |
| 10,000 | 2.0 |
| 15,000 | 3.0 |
| 20,000 | 4.0 |
* I make a distinction here with learning contracts which are prevalent in HE because they are usually a static statement of support needs rather than a reviewable document which tracks progress against learning targets. Also, teaching staff very rarely have any input into them, unlike learning plans in schools.
Inclusion in higher education 