Quality assurance in UK higher education

Abstract

As in other countries, new arrangements for evaluation and quality assurance came with the expansion of higher education in the second half of the 20 century. In the British case, relatively high degrees of institutional autonomy of universities have meant that the introduction of quality assurance has not been without controversy. It was not replacing direct forms of state control with something else. Rather it was seen as infringing longstanding freedoms and independence. It was not surprising, therefore, to find the first establishment of a national quality assurance agency focused exclusively on the fast-growing polytechnic and college sector over the period from the late 1960s up until the early 1990s. The remit of the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) was to ensure comparability of degree standards in the new polytechnics with those in the universities. The CNAA was created by government but was operationally independent of it. The CNAA ‘validated’ polytechnic courses using a system of subject-based peer review centred around periodic institutional ‘visits’; it appointed external examiners to courses following well-established university principles; and finally, it awarded CNAA degrees to successful students in the polytechnics and higher education colleges. Decisions of the CNAA were mainly made by ‘subject boards’ consisting of academics drawn from the staffs of both polytechnics and universities, though there was also an ‘institutional review’ procedure which examined the institution’s internal procedures for quality and standards over the periods between the quinquennial course-based validation visits by the CNAA subject boards.