From unrequited love to sleeping with the enemy

This Accounting Cafe online seminar on 25 March 2022 explored the future relationship between universities and the professional accounting bodies.

Our guests argued that to protect the future of accounting education a new social partnership is necessary between universities and the professional accounting bodies.

A significant problem is the current accreditation system which constrains accounting academics, risks academic freedoms and suppresses innovations in teaching, learning and assessment.

They claimed that university programmes dominated by professional development learning outcomes deprive students from obtaining essential critical skills that would be better suited to employment and career opportunities.

One principle conclusion is that academia and the professional accounting bodies cannot survive without each other, but both must be willing to answer difficult questions and accept constructive criticism.

Their paper, From unrequited love to sleeping with the enemy: COVID-19 and the future relationship between UK universities and professional accounting bodies was published in the Accounting Research Journal in October 2021.

This was interesting session with wide-ranging views from academics, professional accounting bodies and students.

Transcript of the presentation

Umair Riaz: So let me give you a bit of brief background on the paper. So the paper came up with the idea that we were going into Covid-19 pandemic. We were looking at our teaching loads going up and the difficulties we faced during the teaching period around that time.

So we started looking at the idea of how we have been communicating with the professional accounting bodies during this pandemic period, what their responses are like, and how can we further strengthen this relationship. Or if there is a need to further strengthen this relationship.

So we started speaking to different colleagues who were involved with the accreditation process in our department and outside the university. We managed to get some good data out in terms of, you know, just a preliminary data conversation. And we decided, okay, you know what, we’re going to write a paper about this.

So we kind of, we wrote one paper, the initial draft, which we sent it, and it was kind of not accepted around that time. And they said that, you know, there was a special issue, which we sent it to a special issue and they said we can’t accept it because it needs some substantial work, athough there were some very nice ideas.

Then we we took a step back and we decided, okay, what are we going to do? Our initial version of the paper was about case studies, conversation, but this time we said, okay, we’re going to do some interviews with some academics who are teaching focus and you know, some who are on the research side. It doesn’t matter, but who are mainly involved with dealing with professional accounting bodies.

We did some interviews. We managed to get a lot of rich data, even some of the data which we couldn’t use in this particular paper around that time because there was so much to talk about. And, you know, that paper came out from from that data.

The paper mainly argues that the…

First of all, I would say we’ve been very critical and kind of very nosey. You know, we may have upset some people saying, oh, well, you can’t just say, you know, professional accounting bodies are really bad or they are really good or university education is bad or university education is really good. It goes side by side.

So what we’ve tried to argue in the paper is that it’s a relationship which we have been following with professional accounting bodies where they’ve been dominating academia for some time. And that perhaps needs to change. And there is a reason that it needs to change is because of how it was established back in…20 years ago.

When you look at the history that most of the academics who are involved in the curriculum, the design of the professional accounting bodies. They work more on the technical education side, which don’t get me wrong — that’s is really, really good — what students need as well, because students should be able to go out from the university and be able to do things in terms of, you know, how do you do this thing? And this is what the technical education shows them.

But at the same time, what we argue and what actually we believe in, that there is a need for university education. And the university education is not only about technical education, it’s a way of students to come out from their home. You know, they don’t need to kind of self-study. They come to the university, they engage with their colleagues, their mentors with the lecturers, with the staff. They work in different environment. And these are the skills which they need.

And one of the biggest points, which I tell my students all the time, and I said, look, if we look at past ten, 20, 15 years, there is a lot of accounting scandals going on. Who to blame? And perhaps all these accountants are coming out probably from our hands, from our education. And there must be something which we are not doing right. Is it because we are teaching too much technical education, or is it because we are teaching not the right stuff at the university?

And perhaps what we need to do is change both of those approaches or merge both approaches at the same time. So we can do something about it to avoid these kind of shortfalls in the industry.

So that was the idea that we brought the paper and we wanted to argue, look, going forward, what needs to be done is there needs to be an integration, there needs to be a marriage between both and they need to go side by side the technical education and the university education.

I know this is a very kind of brief background, a brief story around the paper, but I’m just going to pass it to Mo or Lara. Okay.

Muhammad Al Mahameed: Thank you so much. Umair. I think I’ll take it from here. So I’ll start actually from where Umair finished. I think maybe he has not read the paper for a while. We did not suggest that universities and professional bodies should go in a parallel way. We actually said there is at some point I think we need a proper divorce between both.

If I may show a few slides, just I prepared a few slides and but yeah.

The whole point is that when we started thinking about this project, we were initiated by the special issue that was in H.E.R. [the Higher Education Research journal] about education and Covid-19. And of course, we had, as you I’m sure you did, ladies and gentlemen, that transition of sudden online things happened. And then the examination and then the tests and all of this happened and we had to learn quite quickly how to do it.

And it was quite a bit of pressure. We did not know what to do. We were not sure what happened. And suddenly the professional bodies they were questioning the reliability, the credibility of the system itself, the higher education system, by saying we might not exempt you from those courses by saying we might not exempt you from those courses if you don’t do controlled environment exams.

So the initial thought was, do you know what, I think we have one student under both or under two ideologies. We have one student that’s looking for two things. Somebody in the university with the ideology of the university and the professional body ideology.

And when we were thinking, so what is actually the university ideology? What are we trying to get out? Umair was talking about, what we get those accounting students into the market place to work and we know there’s scandals. So who to blame? And what are we trying to get? What are we trying to produce?

If we are a factory, are we trying to produce an employee or are we trying to produce somebody who is really skilled, can go and be a good employee somewhere in the world? Or are we trying simply to produce better people, better human beings? Especially with the last ten years, 15 years of the concept of we need more sustainable people. We need more decision-makers who basically take the environment into consideration. Where are we?

I remember that at Aston [university] we had a few years where we basically talked about critical thinking. Critical thinking was a huge thing in our education. So when I remember when we had this curricular review, we always asked, is there a critical thinking component? But this exact component that we were looking at, where we were driven by, in the university, it seems something completely did not exist in accounting and professional bodies.

And then we came into another point where we discovered that actually, we advertise ourselves as universities or as accounting programmes, as programmes accredited, and we have exemptions from courses or modules by accounting professional bodies, where if you look at the accounting and professional bodies’ website, the first sentence or in the first paragraph, normally what you will find that explicitly saying you don’t need a university degree to become a chartered accountant or a CIMA holder or ACCA holder or ACA holder.

This is the first thing they would say. You don’t need a university degree. And I think we quoted this in the paper and that was for me interesting. So this is where we came up with the concept of love and the sleeping with the enemy. Who are we? What is the relationship between us and why is it that the accounting professional bodies is the one or the ones controlling the way we examine our students and why? And why they are more credible between than us to decide the outcome of that student?

So I was thinking when I when we started this paper, I was thinking about, you know, when you get married from different culture, when you have your partner from different culture and you start learning about the other culture. So what they eat, how to eat, maybe what the things they like, what they don’t like, how they see success and how you see success is completely different, different culture.

But what I thought to the other point, to some point of what we were discussing in this paper is actually, maybe we don’t have only cultural differences between universities and the accounting professional bodies, but rather we have value differences. We value different things.

And I think normally if you have a partner value different things than what you do most likely will end up with a divorce. Not with an agreement. And you know, if they really like you, they should come halfway or meet you halfway.

So we came up with this little framework. Okay? We are not claiming that we did a lot of theoretical work in this paper. We’d love to do this political framing again. But we proposed this. We thought, you know, in any design of any module or course you can take it either way.

We start with outcome though. So maybe somebody would start in a different way. But I say we start from the outcome. Normally under the assessment or the end of the ACCA, ACA and CIMA partnership, you will see the outcome going around the concept of recalling concept. And this should be highlighted — recalling concepts.

So memorising these concepts and then applying these concepts in scenarios and write and calculate accurately. This is basically where the outcomes they will be. I’m not saying this is bad things by the way. This is quite important, especially in accounting and business education, because you need to be able to recall these concepts. You need to be able to be a technical and to have the softer skills and the harder skills at the same time.

But still, to become an interesting when we assess the student, we had to assess the student under control environment. Two hours exam. Okay, or one hour exam. Multi-choice, true and false, essay questions, problem solving, whatever you want to call them, okay? But they have to be controlled exam, no open books. No notes, Nothing.

And here, where with Covid, it did not allow this. Basically saying no controlled exams anymore. You can’t do it. The environment will not allow you to do this.

So then, the assessment criteria follow to basically looking into more concept and method are recorded or how much can the student can recall and how much we can recall, we get more marks, more grades and we love to do application all basically under this partnership we have to show that what we teach has applications and this is a huge argument by itself. We can discuss this in many way. Accuracy — it’s something to be accurate in your answers, it’s quite important.

So what are the skills and knowledge a student need? Under this partnership we think they need key principles to understand key principles they need to be able to logically and quickly basically apply key principles to a scenario and be able to identify key figures from a scenario and use it.

And the pedagogy in this basically is relating to the concept to how they are applied in practice.

But when Covid came, everything changed, right? So this is what happened in Covid. This thing here. The assessment changed all this formula, literally. Like we did not have the time. We did not have the place. And we did not have the control over the time and the place where the students are. And by doing that, everything should change.

And this was a nice challenge. And we spoke to a lot of people, actually, me, Umair and Lara, We spoke to people who told us, ah we actually we did this uncontrolled environment a long time ago and we really like it, but we did not have the support for this before.

So the idea of, you know, giving the students the concept, the key issues and told them, okay, take it and apply it to your future, a problem-solving issues. So if you give them a future issue that they never studied before, but you equip them with knowledge and then tell them, okay, you have all the resources and sources open for you. And you have more than 2 hours, more of 24 hours. What we did in Covid-19. Go and give me a report or go and resolve this issue and show me how you did it. And instead of, you know, asking them to recall concepts, to recall and memorise all of these things that they learnt. But to show the ability to put it in a forward way.

I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t too clear maybe at the beginning when I said that maybe the accounting professional bodies, they had their ideology here. The way they think, the way they produce the students, the way they educate. It was quite clear. In the university, I think if you ask educators — and we did ask the educators — If we really understand our ideology, ourself, if we really do understand what we do, we are still — I’m not saying that in absolute terms — but we’re still not quite sure, especially the people who dealt with accounting professional bodies. The people who basically were talking and meeting the accounting professional bodies and exchanging thoughts and exchanging paperwork.

They were not clear about, you know, what we stand for in the university, why we are not another ACA or another ACCA or why we are not CIMA? Why we are X University? or Y University.

So, and during Covid, I think I believe what happened is our ideology went into upper the ground. We start seeing more clear features of the university ideology — what we trying to do. Where are we going with this?

And, you know, maybe you know some examples. Some university in West Midlands already had a big issue with the accounting and professional bodies, and they lost their exemptions and accreditation from them and all of these issues. But did we have a real change? I’m not sure if we have any real change in the universities yet.

I can see more universities actually heading towards accounting professional bodies in more strong terms. But where to go with that? I mean if it’s not a divorce we need to meet halfway, not to accept their terms.

Lara Gee: So, thanks Mo and Umair for your presentations. So, I’m a slightly different colleague to Mo and Umair in that I’ve probably come from what we would traditionally call the accountancy route. So I did a degree in European Studies, so French, Economics and Politics, and then I went into training with PwC and I did my professional studies in accounting all through Kaplan and the traditional route.

We had a trading supervisor called Scary Mary because she threatened us on the first day that we would be sacked if we fail our link exams. And we were constantly under threat and it was a great three years but my God, it was hard work.

And so my background is very much that traditional background. And actually I went from being in practice, working from the PwC, I then went into the Audit Commission. So, I’ve had some public sector as well as the private sector experience is my background. And I wanted to get beyond the spreadsheets and the numbers there and that’s why I moved then into education and I moved to BPP and that again, I was designing and delivering professional training and obviously all that that requires.

And so I didn’t really question my training, to be honest with you. I mean, it’s what I was, it’s who I am. I felt very passionate about having a strong, technical background. And it’s a requirement, legal requirement. We can’t have chartered accountants walking around the country that haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about. So I’m very clear in my mind that the technical goes and sits very importantly alongside the other academic criteria and side of this.

And moving into university was really the first time I was challenged on any of this perception of my training. I thought I was the best in the world, not literally, but, you know, I couldn’t have got a better education than I had. I couldn’t have got a better qualification than one of the chartered qualifications. And I was very proud of that and proud of my background and I still am.

But what I started to realise was that actually the training that I had received, and Covid really accelerated this really, this thought process. The training that I had received had taught me to deliver what I was asked to deliver. It had not at any stage taught me to question what I was delivering and why.

And then as I started to have the space and the capacity to study beyond the technical modules that I’d been teaching, the context of those technical modules and that questioning mind. So even something as simple as, if you’re teaching controls — systems controls to a classroom, really, you know, at the back of your mind that all of those controls and everything you’re teaching is irrelevant if the tone at the top of that organisation is not buying in to what we need.

And Mo was talking about making environmental decisions. We just heard the P&O decisions. They were ready to take the financial hit. They didn’t really care about the workers. And it’s going back and stripping back all that technical content and going to that — who is controlling our institution?

And what I’ve realised as an accountant — I’ve got friends whose careers have gone in other directions — we end up controlling and leading a lot of organisations, and a lot of our big corporates. And if we don’t have a questioning mind as professionals, when we get to that level, then we are setting ourselves up to continually having these large corporate scandals, these large corporate failures, these large corporates not caring about the value of anything but the expense of everything.

And so for me, Covid was a really watershed moment where I realised that the assessments that I was setting were very much about really two things. I realised very much based on giving credit for memory recall, because I was used to writing exams that would be set in a closed book environment where the memory, the technical, was very important.

 And I started questioning, well what was the point in testing people on this in an age of information? All of those five criteria of how management might overwrite controls are within a textbook. I can find all of this information anywhere. What I need to be testing my students is on how to find that information, how to use it, and what the ethics are and the implications of what they are using this information for.

So I’ll just give you a really quick example of how I adapted the tax exam. I realised that if I had a 25-mark calculation for the income tax return, everybody in an open book was going to get 25 out of 25 and clearly, much as I’d love to give everybody a first, it’s not going to look good if everybody receives a first.

And so it made me really design that question. It made me really think about what was behind that question. So we kept it, it was actually the same calculation, but this time it was only worth seven marks. So exactly that same information needed to be found and applied and then I was then asking them, okay, so what would you do next year and how would you adapt this? And then finally, do you think it’s right that you’re telling these wealthy clients to be planning their tax affairs in this way?

And it suddenly opened me up to being able to ask much more about the tax than simply this 25-mark calculation question, which I used to be happily able to mark.

And so for me, where I found, the big thing was I realised, I preferred not having the accreditation ties because I could go so much further with my examination and that’s what I discovered really with this Covid situation.

My other side, I am an associate dean, so I’m very clear on the commercial. There is no way we can get divorced. Mo, we need some, we need some counselling. We can’t — universities — can’t attract students if we don’t pay homage to that technical ability, to the professional standards.

But equally, we do need some respect, as you say. I mean, as a university advocate, I was meeting with somebody who was recruiting for a medium-tier accounting firm, and she actually quite happily said to me, Oh, I’ve told my daughter when she goes to Uni, do any degree except accounting and finance. That’s a waste of money, because you can learn everything you need to know through an apprenticeship.

And I was really shocked. Is that what is seen as an accounting and finance education? It’s so much more than that. It’s the economics. It’s the politics. It’s the ethics that sit behind that. That gives the accounting degree that different step.

But then maybe we come to another crux of the question. Is our university education about providing good citizens, or is our university education about providing employees for accountancy firms? And that’s really where Covid led me and really made me question what was going on, so thank you.

Transcript of the discussion

Toby York: I think it’s a really interesting discussion. And there are clearly quite strongly held views — you can even just see in the chat. But I also know from my conversations about setting up this discussion and the meeting, that there are very strongly held views on both sides, within the professions.

And of course, the professions don’t act alone. They’re acting at the behest of firms and the regulatory authorities and other stakeholders. Without wishing to put anybody on the spot unduly, is there anybody from one of the professional accounting bodies that would like to make some comments, observations or reflections?

Diane Dickson: Toby, it’s Diane from CIMA here. Hi. Hello there. So, I work with universities across the UK. So hello to those of you who I’ve met before. And I’m part of a team where we do a number of events with students. To more educate them on the employability, I suppose.

But what was going through my mind as we were all talking there, was it’s almost — it’s linking the education, professional bodies and the employers, because we also probably need to educate the employers as to what’s included in like an accounting and finance degree. And we work obviously with thousands of employers as other professional bodies do.

But I think probably the employers have a little bit of a lack of awareness that the students gain exemptions, that they’re studying a very relevant degree that could then take them onto a, you know, a finance graduate programme.

And so it’s linking all three I think, I don’t think it’s just you know universities with professional bodies. I think it’s time to join them all up.

And you know, at CIMA we’ve been involved in a number of different partnerships with universities — I suppose whether it’s trying to embed exams or just embed employability sessions. Just to create more awareness of where . . .

And I think for the students as well, often when I’m talking to students, they don’t recognise the value of what they’re doing. You know, until somebody says to them, oh, you know, you’re almost partway through your qualification because you’ve got these exemptions.

Some of them will have gone to that university because of the exemptions, but a lot of them don’t realise how closely matched the modules are to the syllabus and how that creates employability opportunities.

So yeah, it’s a mixture of all three areas. I think.

Toby York: Thank you.

Lara Gee: I think that’s a really important point about that connection with the employers. A lot of our students do join us because we have full accreditation as much as we can get obviously from the professional. And so there is no doubt, I think, someone to put in the chat about, you’re right, university degrees do need that exemption to give them that credibility.

But that other side of the coin is actually what a university is delivering somehting that a pure professional education can’t.

Again, I’ll just take it back to something as simple as Brydon. The Brydon Report. If a load of new rules come out as a result of Brydon eventually when they finally get round to doing something about it, for a student with no kind of ethical behind the scenes training with no context of why Brydon came about, this is going to be another load of technical rules that they’ll learn, they’ll regurgitate — it doesn’t really mean anything.

It’s back to that tone at the top. We are producing people that will be at the top of society. If we don’t give them this ability to think and critique from the beginning, then we will just end up with more of the same, just a bigger rule book.

I mean when I start teaching tax, I think it was one schedule. Now I can’t fit them on the table there are so many rules.

If we don’t teach from the beginning, then we’re just going to have more and more of a rules-based approach that people will just find ways around.

Toby York: Lara, there’s another point that’s being made in the chat, which is that a lot of this is being driven, whether we like it or not, from market demand for what students want and their motivation and reason for studying accounting. So, you know, maybe the students who come and study accounting don’t want the critical thinking — they want the route to high-paid employment.

Lara Gee: Yeah. And I think to be honest, at undergraduate level, I do feel there is room for both. You’ve got three years, you’ve got your core kind of technical, but also around that you can sit this other side. But one, we need appreciation of what that other side is and what it brings to the employer.

So I think Diane’s point is really important that maybe we as universities need to look more about how what we’re teaching already helps to support what students want.

For me, the bigger problem actually, is at post-graduate level, particularly with UK students. So international students come to the UK to study accounting and finance because it’s a Masters degree, because it is going to get them better employment as a result. Actually, conversely, in the UK, it limits a student’s employability chances if they’ve got a Masters in accounting and finance, unless they want to go into research. They are actually less likely to get a job with that Masters in accounting and finance.

And we need to really think about the place of accreditation actually more at Masters level than, I think, we even do undergraduate level.

Muhammad Al Mahameed: On this point, if I can just comment, if you don’t mind. So for me on the marketing demand and what the students really need, it’s I think it’s quite interesting because it seems how the professional bodies see their market is basically people who want to become a chartered accountant.

They certificate holders without university degree. There’s no problem whatsoever if you don’t have a university degree, that you can become a chartered accountant. And there is a huge problem in there.

And I don’t know who mentioned that I don’t want see chartered accountants walking around, and they don’t know what they are doing. I’m sure there are many. Many are walking around and they don’t know what they are doing.

And evident with the scandals that we have in the last ten years.

But the problem is that if the university really wants to see a positive association between higher education and accounting and professional bodies, I think it’s accounting professional bodies, they need to show respect by asking for a university degree.

Instead of not asking for a university degree and then exempting our courses and imposing rules on the universities, by exchanging values in many cases not really applicable for our students, or for the way we teach.

Instead of asking the professional accounting bodies to come and exempt our courses, ask them to ask for university degrees first. What’s the problem with a university degree?

Lara Gee: I think, Mo, someone’s put in the chat about obviously the cost of university education is meaning that actually we’re going back to the middle classes and the wealthy going to university.

And actually, by not needing a degree, what’s being proposed is that this is a fairer way of access to education and the profession for people that can’t otherwise afford to go to university. So there is that kind of side of it as well. It does need to be considered. I think…

Muhammad Al Mahameed: I think this is completely a different argument and a different economic argument in here. But yeah. Yeah.

Lara Gee: And actually, this to me is somewhere where I think there can be more compromise between the two sides in the sense of, okay, fair enough. But at the same time, don’t just make these people who are a process, at the end of a process and will just do what they’re told, like I was when I finished.

Give them that critical thinking. Give them modules that encourage debate, give them modules that say the status quo isn’t right and allow them that freedom.

And actually, what I’m really finding with the students who are now my children’s age is they want this debate. They want to think about the environment. They want to think about what’s socially acceptable and isn’t.

Otherwise, we’re just going to keep creating rules for rules’ sake, and produce advisors that won’t care about those rules because they don’t care about the principles behind them in the first place.

Toby York: I’d be quite interested to hear from somebody on the sort of university side, who has maybe a more I don’t want to sort of start polarising the opinions, but has as a sympathetic view to the current set up. Without wishing to put you too much on the spot, Tim? Timothy Ruck? Do you count yourself as one of those?

Tim Ruck: I used to be a lecturer in accounting. I’m now the senior director of syllabus development at CIMA, so I sort of wear both hats. I’m quite happy to give my thoughts here.

I mean, with regards to having to have a degree, we at CIMA are strongly in favour of social mobility and being able to offer, you know, opportunities into the profession from all walks of life. At the end of the day, it’s going to be the employer who decides the value of education, the value of that person.

With regards to this conversation, what Covid has offered, what we’ve offered at CIMA, is to try and encourage universities to seek more innovative methods, to look at critical thinking, to look at new ways of assessing these, shall we call them soft skills, for want of a better term, critical thinking, communication skills, working in groups.

Universities don’t need to slavishly have to chase exemptions. You know, they can provide the rounded students. And when they come out, the professional body can do the assessment.

I think a lot of this is driven by the marketing of universities thinking that all students want is to get a degree with as many exemptions as they can possibly get. And I think that’s perhaps where we should be looking.

I would encourage universities to work in partnership with CIMA to be able to develop that more rounded professional, rather than just trying to replicate the technical knowledge.

We’re good at assessing.

Toby York: David.

David Yates: I think, first of all this, we’re making a lot of assumptions here.

University education is not a solid, sort of unified, one object. We all know there are different kinds of universities in this country. We got the post-92s that were more technically focussed, your middle market guys and then you’ve got your Russell Groups and you’re Oxbridge at the top.

University education as a construct is not the same thing. Okay, so when we’re talking about a degree, there’s degrees and degrees. And they can be quite different things even though regardless of what the government’s trying to do with the standardisation and the QAA and things like that, degrees are different.

The point about exemptions, I think, students pursue exemptions because it will make them more attractive to employers. And I’ve worked in industry as well.

People with exemptions were attractive because, one, we didn’t have to pay so much for them to get trained. And two, they were also in work more. We didn’t have to give them a lot of day release. So this is something that purely, you know, regardless of competency, or whatever, the idea was we could train them on the job. So that’s something that we’re missing.

But I think a lot of this, what we’ve spoken about today is simply, there are inherent problems which are much bigger than accounting education. Absolutely much bigger, than we’re trying to solve here. Okay.

People about getting to the tops of organisations. Well, maybe the people who get to the tops of organisations are people who do things to get there, become very successful, you know, and it happens. You know, I’ve been teaching about Enron and Arthur Andersen for the last term. So, you know, you feel like that sometimes.

For me, the problem is capitalism. The problem boils back to a Marxist thing. This might make me sound loony left. But the problem is capitalism. You will get inequality across the board.

What can we do to make things more equal? Well, I don’t think there should be a two-tier education system where, you know, if you’re poor, you have to go in through the trade, and if you’re rich you could go to university.

At the same time, the role of university education is not to get people jobs. That is not what we’re here to do. We are not a production factory. I’ve heard the word produce used quite a lot. It’s almost like we’re rolling products off a production line. And this comes up time and time again. It’s like we, you know, some person I used to work with at Aston called it the sausage factory, you know, and I think he’s right.

So I think the problems are way bigger than whether we, you know, this relationship between universities and the professional bodies.

Personally, I think they have to be different things. And if you’re going to do a degree and then you’re going to do a professional examination or whatever, you get the benefit of two kinds of different education.

The problem is, if we start chasing exemptions, we get something called institutionalised amorphism. Education all becomes very, very similar. And then what are we losing out on? We’re not only losing out on the beauty of university education, and sorry if I sound like a Romanticist here. But the chance to explore things that, you know what, that’s going to be sod-all use for me in the job, but it’s really developed me as a person and a thinker and different ways of seeing the world.

I think if we all converge around the idea that we need to educate accounting students for accounting jobs with accounting exemptions, we get stuck in this idea. Okay, well, university is just a servant to the labour market and capitalism, which is not. And I really hope it isn’t. It has to be much more than that.

That’ll do, there’s my two cents, Toby. Sorry if it sound like a bit of a rabble.

Toby York: Thank you very much, David.

Liz Crookes: Thank you. So my background’s into accounting. I did a maths degree, first of all. So one of those degrees that doesn’t directly lead to employment and the idea was to go into teaching, but I decided that I’d try accounting instead. Long story short, I ended up teaching at the University — the University of Derby, but I’ve also taught AAT to apprentices and through the university I’ve taught on CIMA and ACCA. I studied CIMA myself. So that’s my background.

And I can see the benefits of both. And they are quite different things and I think students need to be making informed choices about what do they want.

I asked my foundation students — they’re like year zero students — yesterday. They’re all on an accounting degree and we were talking about the exemptions that they can get through our programmes. We’ve got two, one for CIMA and one for ACCA. And sort of said why — put it out there — why are you doing a degree and not going straight into the professional courses and they want the university experience.

And so yeah, I think as long as they’re making sure that they’re making informed choices, I think that’s a really important thing.

Alice Shepherd: I really agree with Liz with everything that Liz said and as somebody who came into the profession again with a non-related degree, but that degree — I did biochemistry — that degree gave me so much and still gives me so much in terms of critical thinking that helped me in my accounting training.

But what I missed out on by being a non-related degree entrant was, as Lara was saying, you know, the technical side was everything. And it was only later on in my career that I have really come to appreciate some of the philosophical aspects and I really wish I’d had that earlier.

And when I’m teaching that to my students, they kind of go, oh yeah, okay, she’s on about this again. But you know, but I say to them, it makes you question, if you are there, if you are at the table and you can ask the questions, you know, you need to think about with great power comes great responsibility. We’ve been doing Voltaire in an accounting sense.

But I think that, I see it all as part of a professional training. And I was making a comment in the chat a while ago about medical training. It goes on and on and on. You know, I know somebody who’s a surgeon, she never stops. It’s all still, you know, when she was a junior doctor for years on end, I get uncomfortable with the idea that we’re done as an accountant on the day you qualify, you know, we’re not done.

And so I see it all as kind of in quite a long term journey and that’s totally not how the structure works. And certainly not what the marketing messages are.

I think there’s also a real — this is a much bigger structural issue in UK education —over-specialisation overly quickly. And I think I favour the broader the base for quite a long time until you’re informed enough to specialise. But I think we have a there’s almost a kind of desperate rush in the UK to specialise really hard, really early and actually what do you lose by doing that as well as what do you gain? And I don’t think we often talk about what we lose by specialising early.

Toby York: Thanks. Thanks Alice. I want to come back to Hassan

Hassan Rkein: It all comes down, I think, to defining what the university job is, and as an academic I myself, I always tend to ask myself the question what is it that I’m meant to do?

Am I meant to just be there disseminating that knowledge and creating knowledge. Or is it my job to prepare students for their first job, which is what I think the profession, let me say, not maybe the professional body maybe, differ from the accounting professionals. They want us maybe to prepare students for their first job.

And when I was back in Australia, we used to hear that from all of the big four. They used to come up to the university and say, please teach students accounting softwares. And, you know, we’re apparently spending a fair bit of their budget in training those when we happened to be just the one university in a big state back then and they had to hire from us then. So anyway.

Or the other question is, is our job to prepare a student for their entire career, which I’m more into. I believe that we need to determine and define exactly and agree on that ground before we can continue.

Now, I’m based in Lebanon and I happen to be chairing the accounting department here. So, you know, there’s the question here that I think is — should we be interested in closing and bridging the gap between the university and the profession? Because there’s certainly that gap. I’m going to pull out the word definitely. Is that gap getting wider as a result of what happened now recently and in terms of online education and so forth?

And one last point regarding the proctored examination invigilation, and I know that, you know, you’ve got to have your exam and it has to be invigilated in order to have your programme accredited. I thought that maybe Covid has opened my eyes at least to a new way of testing and assessing and grading students, which is, I believe, more aligned with what they will be doing in the workplace when they graduate.

And that’s to have a more of an opt-in everything, not just the open internet, open everything. As long as they’re able of, you know, obtain that knowledge and information which is available everywhere. And that’s what they will be doing: analyse and interpret that data and report that data correctly and communicate it in the right way.

And I think if the student does that, why not get an A? Why do I have to bring them to a room where they have no access to all the things that they will have access to when they graduate and they’re in the workplace, so that my point. Thank you.

Toby York: Martin, tell us about the love triangle.

Martin Martinoff: I think it is important to think in this love triangle between the professional bodies, the firms and the employers and the universities. And actually even just want to echo some of the points that Alison and David mentioned.

And, I personally, if I was running the university, if I was part of the thinking about these issues. I would actually welcome the fact that professional accreditation or professional degrees do not require a university education. And actually, I would try to move away from these kind of exemptions because basically it gives back the intellectual academic freedom to universities. And actually for the university to define what it offers to society in terms of preparing the next generation of citizens.

I mean I cannot speak for any professional body, but I would imagine that most of these decisions are actually driven by employers and by firms.

And to be fair, of the two challenges of why actually firms are choosing to recruit more and more school leavers, or there’s this trend of increasing the number of people who don’t consider a university education as a benefit. One is access to a profession and increasing how inclusive the profession is and how students with different backgrounds, different socio-economic backgrounds, have access to professions.

And the second is actually a number of firms are saying that a university degree does not necessarily equate into people being well prepared.

So I think it’s an important… I think it’s good to have these conversations because it really focussed on some of the important issues that we have to be thinking as educators. You know, how do we, you know, what is the role of university education, how we prepare people for the future?

And I think Toby and others mentioned the point about the exemptions. That a lot of the firms actually couldn’t care less about exemptions. And it’s…and I know that for some universities, the exemptions are important because they attract international students and if I have to be, in a friendly way, be critical of how this you know, isn’t this actually place of the business model of the university of providing an influx of international students and probably has nothing to do with developing a robust group of people that can work in the professions.

So, I think these are very important issues, but I think it comes down to some of the questions that David and Alison, Liz and others. And I know, I have some ideas, what Atul might bring into the conversation and to thinking about, What is the role of the university that what we want to have in that.

And it’s really I would say it’s sad that, you know, I think England is more or less the birthplace of the liberal arts education in which you provide a really broad entry level. Actually, people develop their kind of broader sense and this curiosity and independence of thought.

And right now we seem to focus more, kind of nail down and try to, as people said, to prepare students for the workplace, which is I mean, it could be a by-product. But the key is how do you develop people and how do we develop this broader set of skills.

Toby York: Thank you, Martin, That’s great. Atul.

Atul Shah: Yeah. Thank you. Very interesting, everyone. And important topic.

I just say if we look at the bigger challenges of society today, one of them is clearly climate and the other is inequality. And the third, I would say, is a kind of black lives matter, the diversity aspect.

And if we look at the globalisation of the profession, which has actually happened very fast, and it has been extremely profitable for the profession. It has also led to a standardisation of curricula and a standardisation of examination, etc.

So in a way the profession has actually been doing everything to stamp out diversity. I mean, even if I look at some of the new — you know, I am a member of ICAEW — some of the new developments that ICAEW is considering for the future is to even standardise the teaching, kind of books that are provided and material provided. And then also make the examining online as well.

So I really feel very disappointed when I see that.

You can see from their point of view, from the profession’s point of view, it’s very profitable to standardise and to mechanise and to robot-ise so that, you know, it’s very easy to mark the exams, it’s very easy to collect all the revenues. And all you then need to do is to brand marketing and keep the competitive kind of, you know, keep the brand going.

But actually, you know, culture and I think some people referred to Ruth Hines earlier, I mean, culture is central to accounting. Culture has been stripped of accounting and finance for decades.

And yet when we look at the diversity of accounting and finance practice, culture and dare I say faith, nobody talks about faith as well. I love talking about faith. Faith and culture are central to accounting practice in many parts of the world, and finance practice. And we need to open those boxes.

So coming back to this kind of discussion, you know, I absolutely endorse what David said and what Martin said as well, that the university is actually very bad at teaching techniques. Most universities are very bad at teaching techniques. They are not geared towards it.

And I also know many qualified accountants who go into teaching who actually don’t want to teach any technical accounting as well, because they are so put off by it.

So, you know, also how to make the degree enjoyable is such a fascinating subject. There’s so much kind of a cultural element. There’s a social element, there’s a public interest element, there’s an ethical element. We’ve killed all the fun of the subject. The professions have been part of that murder, if you like.

And also we have betrayed, you know, what a university is. But because our students are not just mixing with their own peers in doing the courses, they are mixing with other people as well. And it’s so important that they feel empowered, that they have some ideas, they develop their own confidence and thinking, their culture actually is represented in the classroom, in the material in which they actually face. And suddenly you see sparks in their eyes and, you know, celebrate it. And the parents also want that.

So good cultures are totally absent, but they are alive in accounting practice but are not brought into the classroom. Connections are not made. Faith and ethics is also disjointed. So all those kinds of things.

So there is a lot of opportunity there, but the professions definitely should not be allowed to interfere with university curriculum. Thank you.

Toby York: Thanks, Atul. Maybe this would be a good time, maybe for Lara and Mo to sort of reflect back on the discussion and the chat. Share with us a little bit about what you’ve heard and what you think.

Lara Gee: Well, wow, we have debated capitalism. It’s brilliant — I love this. I love how an experience has motivated us to write about how we were assessing and then, therefore, teaching our students, has led to this discussion, which led to what the role of university in society is. You know, well beyond the original remit of the paper.

And I think hearing everybody’s passion in both directions is fabulous. And is what university to me is about and is what I personally didn’t get from my technical training. And for me, is what I feel is important about an accounting and finance degree compared to leaving school at 18 and getting the workplace training — is that it opens you to this discussion and the privilege. Let’s not forget the privilege of this discussion. Thank you.

Muhammad Al Mahameed: Great. Thank you, Lara. and thank you, Toby. Thank you, everyone, for this great discussion.

And I mean, like, to some extent, we meant to have this piece as a provocative piece. We wanted to provoke this. And we did. And I’m really glad that we are having this discussion. And I think it’s time to have it also, it’s quite important to have this discussion.

And we started from the point where we both on both sides care, which is society and we want to achieve in this society, either universities or professional bodies.

And I think it’s time also to review this relationship. It’s really time to review it. And we should review it and we should accept and we suggested in the paper, different ways maybe to review it and different outcomes.

Maybe I’m a bit more towards harsher review, but somebody mentioned about the medicine and the medical training. Ah, that was the you Alice.

Alice Shepherd: Yeah, it was me, Mo. Yeah.

Muhammad Al Mahameed:  I mean this model, it’s quite interesting. So what’s it called? GMC, right? So the GMC, it’s the one is basically the professional body, which is maintain the qualification of doctors and surgeons around the country to make sure that they are doing the proper job, not the university they graduated from.

But the university they graduated from, it’s quite important in that journey. It’s not something that we can drop at some point because education is expensive in the country.

Alice Shepherd: Universities that offer medical training are under very tight restrictions around their professional accreditation and they run into lots of problems in the pandemic because of the clinical, practical nature of that. So, but it’s an interesting — you’re absolutely right — it’s not the university that maintains that forever. It kind of passes on. And it’s just a stage.

And I think we feel like we’re the kind of — there are still stages, but we’re kind of that temptation to contract it all into a really short period of time. And I’m not sure about that.

Muhammad Al Mahameed:  Definitely. I think there’s… I mean, it’s quite a practical science, the medicine and accounting is quite social and practical at the same time. So there’s a lot of practicality and there’s a lot of technical skills that has to be equipped and has to be maintained throughout the profession, which is the university, no way can maintain that.

But we also have a problem. We can see that. I think we have issues that are coming to the surface after Covid-19 with accounting. And I think time to hold more discussion like this one. Thank you, Toby. Thank you, everyone. And great being you today.

Toby York:  Parminder. Yeah. Please make a contribution.

Parminder Johal:  Hi, everyone. My name is Parminder Johal. And I’m the head of department for accounting and finance at the University of Derby.

And yes, an amazing discussion. I could talk about capitalism until the cows come home, but I’m not sure we’d get very far.

But the point I wanted to try and make, because I’ve heard so much and critical thinking has come up often. I don’t think we should dismiss the idea that just because students are on an accounting and finance programme which has accredited exemptions, that they are not getting a university experience.

And I think somebody mentioned it, and again apologies, I can’t remember your name, but I think it’s the balance that’s crucial. It’s the balance that’s crucial. It’s the programme design that’s crucial. It’s the opportunities that go beyond the programme that are crucial.

Coming to university is not just the programme. So okay, we have an accounting and finance programme. It has accreditations. Fine, but that’s not just it.

So, I think we’ve been quite harsh with ourselves. I think the professional bodies, some would argue, have given a lifeline to us by saying, okay, look, we’re going to help you along, we’re going to help make your students sort of leapfrog a few stages.

But I think the profession is continuous learning, it’s lifelong learning. And I think that’s where we as a university, that’s our position, whatever your discipline, whatever curriculum.

So if it’s designed properly, it’s intense. Yes. There are some exemptions that, you could argue, it would be great if we didn’t have to have those.

But I think my view is that there is space. We are in a market where, yes we have to work with employers. There are finance jobs out there. And we talked about students pursuing critical thinking, being innovative.

But I would say, in my institution, the biggest challenge that we have with students is that of confidence. And I think them being on an accounting degree with with accreditation for exemptions doesn’t mean that they’re not able to tap into all the other opportunities that we offer them.

Toby York:  Thanks. Parminder, those are well made points. this.

Listen, I just want to thank everybody for coming along to another Accounting Cafe seminar. It’s such a joy to find a tribe. I was talking to Lara before we started about finding your tribe. And it’s been a lot of fun.

And there’s been such a broad range of discussion. Our last seminar last month was about innovations in accounting education, talking about all the things you could do, even within the framework of professional accreditation and exemptions. And this week we’re sort of pushing again saying, well, these are the things we can’t do. So it’s broad ranging and it’s good fun.

If you want to sign up on LinkedIn to the group, then we can keep in touch with you.

I’ll put a recording of this session up on the website — I’ve left a link in the chat. So once the recording is up and if I get time, I’ll try to sort of synthesise some of the comments into a pithy article. But that’s probably too far down the to-do list. But I’ve made a kind of moral commitment to do that now.

So listen, thank you so much, Lara, Mo and Umair, who I know it isn’t here, but thank you very much for your time. And thank you also to everybody for your very frank and valuable contributions to this important debate. Thank you.

Seminar hosted by:

• Dr Muhammad Al Mahameed, Assistant Professor in Managerial Economics and Management Accounting at Copenhagen Business School Muhammad and Visiting Assistant Professor at College of Business Administration at the University of Sharjah, having previously been a lecturer in Accounting, Sustainability and Entrepreneurship in the Department of Accounting at Aston University. Before that he worked in investment banking, auditing and accounting firms in the UK and Syria. Muhammad is currently leading the ‘RWAD’ project, which is primarily designed to supply the disadvantaged Entrepreneurs with financial and analytical skills.
  
• Lara Gee, Associate Dean Post Graduate Studies for the College of Business and Social Sciences at Aston University, Birmingham. Lara has worked in professional training and higher education for the past 15 years and specialises in taxation, audit and accounting. Previously she has worked in audit for PwC and The Audit Commission.
  
• Dr Umair Riaz, Lecturer in Accounting at Aston University.

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