Generic Skills in the Context of Higher Education

ABSTRACT The Higher Education Council Report Achieving Quality (October 1992) identifies ‘generic skills, attributes and values’ as the ‘central achievements of higher education as a process’. The account which the Report offers of those generic skills and of the graduate ‘attributes and values’ which, it claims, should accompany them is flawed, however, by a pervasive vagueness and inconsistency. Personal qualities, generalized capacities, individual attitudes, value systems, professional competencies, higher order generic skills and lower order technical ones are all lumped together in a general hodge‐podge of desirable graduate attributes. In the present paper the authors offer a more systematic, though still preliminary, analysis of higher order generic skills as they manifest themselves in thinking, research and communication, and of the way in which these skills assume a variety of different forms in their different disciplinary contexts. Definitional work of this kind, the authors argue, is currently neglected, but it remains a fundamental pre‐condition for any successful review or audit of Quality in undergraduate education.