EXCLUSIVE

A GROUP of 30 UK universities, including seven in Scotland, have started a breakaway move to block what members see as Government plans to introduce a national curriculum for higher education.

They are concerned at moves to include ''templates'' or core content requirements for what is taught on degree courses.

They are currently drafting a joint response to the Government's quality taskforce, opposing plans to create a cadre of trained examiners in response to an alleged blind-eye approach to falling standards under the current system of self-policed assessment.

Now the group of largely research-intensive universities - which includes Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee, Stirling, Strathclyde, Aberdeen, and Heriot-Watt - is expected to turn its attention to wider issues of quality assurance, including templates and quality threshold standards.

All universities are currently preparing responses to the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education's consultation document ''An agenda for quality''.

The group's collective paper on plans for trained examiners followed recent meetings in the capital - chaired by Edinburgh University Vice Principal Colin Bell - and in Birmingham.

Yesterday, Edinburgh University Principal Sir Stewart Sutherland told The Herald: ''I hope this group of 30 will go on and do more work on quality assurance.

''There are dangers in the programme reviews and the templates being proposed. The idea that you can produce a common set of structures against which particular programmes can be designed will either be so general that it won't tell you anything or alternatively, to avoid that, it will become so detailed and bureacratised that it will become the beginnings of a national curriculum.

''How can you define what a graduate in history or mathematics would be expected to know or be able to do?

''I chose my examples very carefully. How much Scottish history would you expect and would that be different for a graduate in a Scottish and an English university?

''How much medieval and contemporary history should they do? It's this tension between banality on the one hand and too much detail on the other.

''In maths the real concern is, what counts as a maths degree in one university may not be suitable in another university.

''Maths, along with other subjects, is fairly subjective where you build on each year and go further and further into detail. Students at Imperial College will reach a higher level in their knowledge of maths than others from Auchtermuchty University. A mass higher education system is fine - that's what we have got - but you need to have different university degrees for different needs. There's no meaningful threshold standard that you could use for every degree course in the country.''

Professor Sutherland said the group's opposition to plans for trained examiners should not be seen as implying that they were a ''bunch of Luddites who don't wan't to be scrutinised or have a degree of accountability''.

He added: ''Dearing was suggesting examiners may spend up to 60 days a year. That it could be suggested by an otherwise sane and sensible committee seemed to be a sign of activity that was not balanced by common sense.''

Susan Bassnett, pro-Vice Chancellor of Warwick University, said: ''People are being told that the external examining system is a corrupt, cosy little club which enables some doddering fool in the University of Lesser Crumbfast to ring his old chum in the University of Ramsbottom who will pass everything through on the nod. The language of the agency's proposals is full of statements about improving the system. But the old boy scenario simply isn't true.''