Quality Assurance in UK Higher Education: Issues of Trust, Control, Professional Autonomy and Accountability |
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| Authors: | Andreas Hoecht |
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| Institution: | (1) Portsmouth Business School, University of Portsmouth, Richmond Building, Portland Street, Portsmouth, PO1 3DE, UK |
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| Abstract: | This article explores the issues of trust, control, professional autonomy and accountability in higher education quality assurance
in the UK. The main part of this article is conceptual, but it includes results from semi-structured interviews with academic
staff that were conducted at two “new university” business schools. Both institutions are broadly similar in their key characteristics
and have experienced a transformation to university status in the early 1990s. The article argues that there has been a change
from informal “light-touch” quality control systems based on local practices and a significant amount of trust and professional
autonomy in the early 1990s to a highly prescribed process of audit-based quality control today. The article argues that accountability
and transparency are important principles that academics should wholeheartedly embrace, but that the audit format adopted
in the UK introduces a one-way accountability and provides “rituals of verification” (Power 1997) instead of fostering trust,
has high opportunity costs and may well be detrimental to innovative teaching and learning. |
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| Keywords: | accountability control legitimacy professional autonomy professional project quality assurance trust |
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