by Farzana Haniffa
Quality assurance (QA) processes adopted in our university system have been the subject of the last two Kuppi contributions. Ramya Kumar and Ahilan Kadirgamar discussed how QA tools burden academics unduly, fail to provide useful input into the running of the institutions, although maintained at great cost to institutions and leave many of the most serious problems facing our universities unaddressed. Today, I would like to present yet another perspective on why we need to rethink QA processes in the Sri Lankan system. I will do so by referencing the global critique of QA processes in Higher Education (HE) and suggest ways we should move forward.
QA processes emerged in a context of funding cuts to institutions, the competition for students for revenue purposes, the massification of higher education and the transformation of HE into a commodity form that supposedly enhances individual students’ future income. Notions of “accountability” and “transparency” and “fitness- for- purpose” were the selling points of education as a commodity and have generally framed QA processes (Harvey 2024). In Sri Lanka, the leaching away of an understanding of HE as a common good and as essential for the future wellbeing of society as a whole resulted in the call for making publicly-funded universities also “accountable” to the public through their QA systems. Such accountability processes were designed to provide assurances that universities spent their money on maintaining standards, mainly to produce “employable” graduates.
Just a few years ago there were calls in Sri Lanka for withdrawal of funding from HE due to a lack of sufficient return on investment (ROI) with regards to employability. The recognition that—as Kadirgamar laid out in a previous Kuppi—jobs are created by the economy and not through universities is insufficiently prioritised in our HE discourses. That an educated citizenry is a national asset that a government should spend for, and that economic policies should be designed to ensure employment remains underacknowledged in our policy conversations. Another use that QA systems are seen to serve in Sri Lanka is to limit corruption and malpractices by academics. The spectre of the rogue academic haunts policy conversations though they rarely migrate into the documentation.
‘Key barriers’
Internationally, it is recognised that QA systems are strained – one article claims that key barriers to a successful QA process are ” faculty resistance, resource limitations and tensions between standardisation and contextual adaptability” (Rini et al 2025). They are critiqued as one-size-fits-all processes emerging from the global north that are not sensitive to resource-scarce contexts and do not consider their impact on institutional cultures unfamiliar with their logics. The fact that they emerge from a positivist western framework that makes no reference to the histories of inequality and resource constraints that impact universities in the global south has also been widely critiqued (Mzimela & Moyo 2026). Other reviews recognise that academics see QA processes as having imposed an additional structure on already existing university mechanisms with little to show for the added time and labour (Harvey 2024). They also show that there is a globally prevalent resistance to QA processes as they do not overlap with most academics’ notions of quality (Harvey 2024). They are recorded as stultifying creativity and as restricting academics looking to provide transformative learning experiences for students. One article described QA as an “overbearingly administrative straight jacket” that was an impediment to transformative teaching approaches (Harvey 2023). It is time for Sri Lanka to see whether QA systems, as they currently exist, serve the actual requirements of quality that Sri Lankan universities are grappling with.
Elaborate paperwork edifice
QA systems function as an elaborate paperwork edifice to surveil maintenance of generic externally-formulated compliance standards. In the Sri Lankan context, the lack of a visible feedback loop regarding records maintaining attendance, peer review, and student evaluation, maintained as QA requirements and the large amounts of paperwork generated for the external reviewers to acknowledge that such processes are, in fact, practiced in institutions, are just some of the problems of a QA process. QA paperwork generation eats into academics’ already heavy workload of designing courses, preparation for lectures, delivering lectures and carrying out discussion groups with different kinds of students, laboratory work, field work, designing assessments, carrying out assessments, proctoring exams and marking and supporting students throughout this process.
Additionally, academics are also required to carry out research, analyze such research and write out their findings, submit their writings for publication and respond to review processes. Academics also engage in peer review processes for other people’s work and prepare for and present their work at conferences as part of their academic responsibilities. A QA system that functions on top of these processes undermine academics’ everyday work that also demands competence and excellence. It is no wonder then that QA processes have little or no buy-in from academics globally. In Sri Lanka the QA process with its external criteria and the authoritative backing from the UGC undermines the University’s own capacity – through its departments, faculty boards and senates to identify and address issues that each institution considers to be crucial to its own context. Globally there is a recognition now that the lack of academic buy-in is a problem that negatively affect QA systems.
Need for greater reflection
In the Sri Lankan context, greater reflection is needed regarding what QA processes actually accomplish. Today QA is ritualistically referenced as crucial to the work of HE institutions. Sometimes, the low performance of QA processes and criticisms made against them are read as indicative of problems of implementation that are yet to be handled and not as design flaws in the systems themselves. For instance, the Sri Lankan QA system has section on subject benchmark statements. In some disciplines there are no subject benchmark statements formulated and in some they were formulated over a decade ago. It is unclear what if any use is made of these subject benchmarks. The literature on QA acknowledges that it has taken on a life of its own with very little to show for it. (Harvey 2024)
This is not to say—as both Kumar and Kadirgamar also acknowledged—that the QA processes have had no positive impact in the Sri Lankan context. The substantial work that has gone in during the past two decades to formulate a QA system and a qualifications framework for the Sri Lankan context must be acknowledged. Qualifications frameworks have been set in place to ensure that there is some uniformity with regards to the different programmes that institutions commit to taking forward, the numbers of contact hours, notional hours, laboratory work, etc., for a particular level of a course. Currently, there is a discussion about merging the two frameworks in place in the Sri Lankan context for academic and vocational education (SLQF and NVQ) so that there is mobility for students between vocational and academic programs. Further, such a framework makes Sri Lankan degrees, certificates and diploma programmes legible to other context and other frameworks. This is a necessary minimum requirement in the global reality that we currently inhabit. A Quality Assurance process that ensures programme compliance with QF frameworks and is limited to that narrow purpose remains useful.
Time to redesign systems
As those who have driven the process and are in positions that have a bird’s-eye view on how QA practices have streamlined the functioning of local universities tell us, the QA process has been important in transforming our universities systems. Unfortunately, though, the shortcomings of QA processes are still routinely attributed to Sri Lankan academics’ unwillingness and lack of commitment to take them forward. When considering reforms to HE it is important that we review our QA systems and have a more sophisticated analysis of problems and propose realistic next steps. It is time to redesign our systems to better address current problems. The need for equity among both staff and students in our institutions, managing the problems of staff work overload in a context of shortages, the inordinate influence of politics on appointments to higher levels of administration, the different systems regulating undergraduate and post graduate programmes in our institutions, the burden of a bureaucracy that remains unaccountable to both staff and students, and the role of Artificial Intelligence in pedagogy should all be considered when reviewing our QA systems. If we are to improve upon it, a QA system should be a mechanism, not for compliance to now dated standards but for ensuring that our universities will be vibrant centres of learning where our staff and students will thrive.
(The author is Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Colombo)
Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.