Stefan Collini’s What are universities for? (2012) reserves just a few pithy paragraphs for quality assurance. This emphasis hardly reflects the sector’s experience since the advent of the Office for Students (OfS), charged it seems to destabilise England’s quality oversight system. Today, we might respond to the question in the title of Collini’s book with: to service the regulator.
Highly regarded internationally, the old system operated on the premise that when institutional objectives and procedures were quality-code compliant – and the right people understood and followed them – the right conditions existed to guarantee quality and standards in practice. That way, those who needed to be assured would be.
