<B>By Asoda TIRVASEN</B>

For many practitioners in tertiary education institutions, the terms ?Quality audit? instill a feeling of fear and discomfort. Auditing has for long been associated with the world of finance and has often been considered as being incompatible with the academic world. We tend to find it quite normal to have the quality of educational provision or the credibility of private educational providers being questioned in our daily newspapers.

However the quality of educational provision in our public-funded institutions does not always respond to criteria set. The recent quality audit report on the Mauritius Institute of Education indicates that our public-funded institutions also need to be scrutinised. The lead tertiary educational institution, the University of Mauritius, was in fact the first public- funded institution to be audited and the organization has since been trying hard to improve in problem areas, which have been highlighted in the audit report. The pressure is now on other tertiary public-funded institutions, namely the Mahatma Gandhi Institute, the University of Technology and the Mauritius College of the Air.

Various workshops have been organized recently by the Tertiary Education Commission to sensitise practitioners about the whole process. Basically, the quality audit probes into such areas as curricula, research, teaching and learning environment, as well as various other elements related to students and the staff of the educational institution. The educational auditors explore the weaknesses and strengths of the tertiary education institution.

There is, however, a misconception that associates the educational audit with a check-list approach. Essentially, it is not a question of respecting set criteria. It is an overall judgement made on the level of quality reached by the educational provider. It must be emphasized that the judgement reached by the auditors is based on evidence gathered through the probing exercise.

Specialists in education audit emphasise that there should not be a feeling of fear in view of an audit for its key purpose is to improve on existing services and structures. Resistance to audit is linked with the threat of loss of autonomy. Obviously the bureaucratic exigencies of the process are sometimes quite hard when the institution?s staff is already overstretched with a heavy load of work. In Britain the rise of the audit culture in the higher education sector has been associated with the loss of trust of stakeholders in educational providers and the introduction of managerial techniques in the service sector. Accountability then became an imperative but calling the big educational institutions to account is no easy task. Furthermore, the process does not go without additional cost.

Yet to be competitive in the global world, Mauritius has to be in line with international trends and the local context is being geared more and more towards accountability in all sectors. Policy makers are insisting on the fact that public funds must be judiciously spent.

The recurrent and capital government grants for the whole public-funded tertiary education sector are at present more than Rs 800 million; hence the pressure on our public-funded tertiary education institutions to indicate the level of quality in their provision of education.

The end result should be improvement of educational services; otherwise, the whole process of quality would be a real show with a waste of resources already scarce in public-funded institutions. The onus for change is on the educational institution rather than on the regulatory body.