Despite its dreary and off-putting title this publication of the third Lampeter Archaeology Workshop raises important issues which have· come home to all archaeology departments in Britain over the last few years as a result of preparing for the Teaching Quality Assessment (TQA). As Paul Halstead's ironically amusing contribution makes clear, this exercise in checking on the quality of the paper trails documenting departmental procedures has cost tens of thousands of hours of staff time which could more usefully have been spent on the teaching and pastoral care of students or on carrying out research, while producing relatively slight benefits in identifying places where systems need to be improved and in forcing departments to reflect on their procedures. The exercise also led to the setting up of a committee to produce a 'benchmarking statement' for archaeology degrees, constructed around the three areas of humanities, science and practice and listing a series of topics which archaeology degrees could be expected to include, as well as specifying what represents a satisfactory level of student performance. One section of this book is concerned with presenting the 'benchmarking statement' and a variety of reactions to it. Others present a range of perspectives on the current teaching of archaeology in British universities and suggestions for future developments in specific areas of archaeological teaching and learning. As Hamilakis and other contributors point out, the TQA and its associated 'benchmarking' are one of many aspects of the bureaucratisation and centralised control being extended by government over the UK HE system in the name of an accountability based on the perceived economic importance· of providing students with transferable skills in the employment market which has been behind the move from an elite to a mass higher education system. It is hardly a surprise that· that most of the contributors to this volume are at least suspicious of, if not hostile to, this process, an attitude I'm sure is shared by the academic discipline as a whole. One major reason for the hostility is the belief that the new student learning and assessment systems being put in place are designed as training for docile economically-productive citizens, rather than education intended to result in questioning, critical individuals. I'm reasonably optimistic on this score. Educating students to be critical has always been at the core of archaeology higher education in Britain, in contrast to other countries with a stronger tradition of respect for authority and I see no sign of this changing. Furthermore, precisely because the TQA systems are concerned with the paper trail rather than the experience, there is plenty of room for grass-roots resistance and subversion. However, to some degree the academics and the 'professionals', the great majority of archaeologists who work outside universities, or at least their representatives, have divergent views on this. The latter want archaeological higher education to produce round pegs for round professional holes, whose areas of relevant expertise can be ticked off so that they can demonstrate their ability to provide a satisfactory service for their clients.