left to my own devices – occasional thoughts on higher education

Photo by Jen Spencer from Flickr

[This post was written as a keynote/presentation to the Annual Conference of the Quality Strategy Network on 18 Sept. 2025. Unfortunately personal circumstances meant I couldn’t attend and deliver at the Conference, so I’m sharing this now and in this way.]

This piece has its origins in something I wrote in June that was published in WonkHE, seeking to link the most recent developments in the national approach to assuring the academic quality and standards of English higher education to Sir David Watson’s seminal article from 2006 Who killed what in the quality wars?

when and what

The label Quality Wars (as used by Watson, and many more since) refers to events that had their roots in the late 1980s; then flared most spectacularly in the 1990s, before peace broke out in 2001 (while still having an afterlife); and restarted in 2015 when HEFCE reopened the question of how we could be sure of the academic quality and standards of the higher education offered in England.

Briefly, and inevitably a little over simplistically, these Quality Wars had two causes.

The first was the rise of the regulatory state.

In the 1980s and into the 1990s this was driven by Conservative governments determined to hold the public sector to account, a desire rooted in many things but particularly and fundamentally its deep scepticism about the value of this public sector.  In the 1990s and into the 2000s the driver was the result of Labour governments firmly committed to the role of the state and the public sector, and which led to a determination to demonstrate this value.  Across a range of areas this led the significant growth of the regulatory-audit state, including in higher education.

The other cause was the expansion of higher education.

From the early 1990s the number of students in English higher education nearly doubled.  The number of universities, of course, more than doubled, once the 1992 Higher and Further Education Act granted university status to the polytechnics.  Both developments gave rise to concerns, and multiple jeremiads, that ‘more means worse’.  This in turn (again in the context of the expansion of the regulatory-audit state) resulted in a very significant growth in the external requirements took place in the English higher education sector to either prevent this from happening, and/or demonstrate that it was not the case.

The Quality Wars were the result, as battles waged over the development, implementation and impact of these external regulatory requirements relating to academic quality and standards in higher education.

why

There are many excellent accounts of these quality wars, most notably Paul Greatrix’s work (both his monograph and multiple blog posts); the insider account from Roger Brown; and a number of valuable posts on WonkHE by David Kernohan.  These, particularly the work of Greatrix and Brown, set out in admirable and forensic detail the issues at stake; how they played out; and offer insightful analysis and interpretation.  I am a huge admirer of these works, and indeed of the value of detailed, analytical, narrative history, and/but I am not going to replicate or seek to supplement those accounts and analyses.  This piece takes a different approach, rooted in my motivation for looking at the Quality Wars.

There are three reasons for my wanting to revisit Watson’s piece.

The first is it has rightly had a long-lasting impact on how we view these issues.  Nearly 20 years after it was published feels a good time to reflect on this.

The second is that prior to its publication, Watson delivered this is a paper at the first annual conference of the Quality Strategy Network, which I was fortunate enough to attend as one of my first external events as a newly minted de facto head of QA at an English university.  For me there is, therefore, a certain ‘circle of life’ quality about looking at this again now.

The third reason is that Watson’s academic background was as a historian, and that will have inevitably influenced his approach and his analysis.  I’m also a (lapsed) historian, and I perhaps bring a not entirely dissimilar perspective to these issues.

how

This bring me back to what this piece is.  Sir David Cannadine once described a claim, attributed to a French historian, that historians fell into one of two groups:

the parachutists, who survey the broad landscape of the past from a great height; and the truffle hunters who immerse themselves in the dense morass of evidential detail … the parachutists seek to comprehend the overall picture, but at the price of a certain unavoidable superficiality; the truffle hunters know the facts.

David Cannadine, Class in Britain (Yale, 1998), p.163

My normal inclination is towards truffle hunting.  On this occasion, though, I’m going to seek to go against type and be a parachutist.

Rather than delve into the detail of the Quality Wars, I’m going to take a broader view – seeking to take the parachutist’s vantage point, to discern three of what I think are the key features of the Quality Wars.  This won’t be a comprehensive overall picture, and I suspect I may at times fail to avoid the trap of superficiality, but I hope to be able to give a sense of three important features of the Quality Wars.

And as a final preparatory statement, I should probably (against my inclination) offer up something personal, i.e. my own role in the Quality Wars.  I’ve been the professional services lead for QA teams, policies and processes at universities.  I’ve also reviewed, indeed still review, for QAA as well as (currently) for two PSRBs.  I think that gives me at least some basis for what I’m about to cover.  However, my time working in quality assurance began in 2001; i.e. after the end of what I’ll refer to as the First Quality War.

Additionally, I’ve never worked for a sector body, or at executive level at a University.  This is definitely a perspective from one of the infantry, not a member of the high command on either side.

audit and review

One of the key elements of Watson’s analysis in Who killed what, is the emphasis he gives to what he calls the ‘collaborative gene’; i.e. the history of the UK university system ‘to take academic responsibility for its own enlargement … admired around the world for its commitment to systematic peer review’.  Which links to another phrase coined by Watson, in another piece, about the importance of the ‘controlled reputational range’ of UK higher education.

However, my piece in WonkHE drew out this issue, so I am not going to address it again here.  Instead I’m going to focus on something I’ve touched on in another post, but from a slightly different perspective.

This key aspect of the Quality Wars was succinctly captured in David Kernohan’s insightful post from 2019, on this topic:

The quality wars of popular legend refer to the tensions between these two competing models of quality assurance – the consensual, sector-owned, provider level views taken by H[igher] E[ducation] Q[uality] C[ouncil’ and the imposition of the subject review process seen very much as a tool of government.

David Kernohan, What did you do in the quality wars, WonkHE, 21 Oct. 2019

Kernohan summarises something that is one of the key elements of Watson’s original piece.  This was the tension between a sector-led approach that focused largely on audit (i.e. assessing the effectiveness with which universities, as autonomous bodies, managed their academic quality and standards); and assessment/review of provision (i.e. undertaking review visits to assess/review provision directly, including observing teaching sessions and looking at examples of student assessed work).

Watson’s Who killed what spends a great deal of time addressing the issue of the tension and competition to these two competing approaches to the external regulation of academic quality and standards.  And for me this tension between audit, and assessment-review, remains fundamental to any perspective on the development of the regulation of academic quality and standards.

This was at the heart of the fiercest battles of the 1990s.  The two approaches operated alongside each other in the early to mid-1990s, and some date the end of the quality wars to the mid-1990s and the Joint Planning Group that sought to reconcile these two contrasting approaches.

I’m not sure I agree with that.

Although new arrangements were put in place from 1997, not least with and through the establishment of QAA in that year, the two approaches of audit and assessment/review (with the resulting significant burden on universities) continued to run side-by-side.  It was only when the sector revolted against this burden in 2001 that we saw a settlement in the Quality Wars.  I’d therefore fix the First Quality War as ending in 2001.

With introduction of QAA Institutional Audit from this date, external assessment/review largely disappeared (with dishonourable mentions to the short-lived Developmental Engagements, and Discipline Audit Trails).  From this time audit was the approach to external regulation of academic quality and standards.

Yes, this was audit against what at time seemed like an overly expansive, and expanding, set of external reference points.  But the methodological approach held its ground through multiple changes as the specific operational methods changed and evolved.  Even when the word ‘review’ appeared in a methodology’s name (e.g. Institutional Review for England and Northern Ireland; Higher Education Review), the reality was that this was audit.  And the approach, and the peace in the quality wars, survived such storms as the 2009 Industry, University and Skills Committee’s investigation of higher education (with a significant and high profile focus on academic quality and standards); the jejeune recommendations of 2010’s Browne Review; and the calls in the early 2010s for more risk-based approaches quality assurance.

The peace in the Quality Wars was only broken in 2015, when HEFCE threw the board in air.  When it did so, it pointedly referred to arrangements for ‘quality assessment’.  This initiative largely fell flat due to HEFCE’s replacement by OfS, but OfS continued in a similar vein.

Of course the old approach of comprehensive subject review did not return.  Instead we got the 21st century version: the focus on outcomes, with the regulator largely getting assurance via the consideration of quantitative data; and where this data suggested there were potential concerns, instigating ‘boots on the ground’ assessments/reviews.

This emphasis on assessment/review can also be seen in TEF, as this came in alongside the new national approaches to quality assessment ‘at the baseline’.  TEF utilised core quantitative data, plus supplementary data (qualitative as well as quantitative) supplied by higher education providers, rather than review visits, but essentially it was assessing provision rather than auditing whether providers were effectively managing academic quality and standards for themselves.

I’ve taken a broad view here, and overlooked details that others would focus on.  That’s the nature of a parachutist’s view.  But I think the broad contours of what I’ve said here hold up.  And this draws out the ongoing validity and usefulness of a key element of Watson’s article.  The audit-assessment/review balance or tension was and remains critical to considering the way academic quality and standards in higher education are externally regulated.

At the time that Watson wrote, the madness of running parallel comprehensive cycles of institutional audit and subject review had been replaced by what was essentially an entirely audit-based approach.  We’ve now moved to a position where we have an almost entirely assessment/review-based approach from OfS, albeit not a comprehensive approach but a selective one based largely perhaps almost entirely, on quantitative data – and which is not doing the job needed.

Whether we can now strike a balance drawing on both cyclical audit, with the capacity for selective assessment/review where needed, remains to be seen.  What is clear is the continuing importance of this key element of Watson’s article.

‘the death of universities’

The quote above is taken from the title of 2004 book by Professor Mary Evans, Killing Thinking: Death of the Universities.

Watson’s Who killed what takes Evans’ work as a vividly illustrative example of another key feature of his analysis:  a strain of academic response to the expansion and increased regulation of higher education in the 19990s and early 2000s that saw audit and assessment as ‘on the one hand a form of Weberian iron-cage, and on the other a metaphor for the state take-over of universities’.

Watson goes into some depth, though less than on the audit/assessment issue, on this critique of what happened in the Quality Wars.  He undermines, in some places gently demolishes, many aspects of this school of thought, particularly the ‘it’s all going to hell in handcart’/golden age tone that underpinned much of this.

He also notes, though that this perspective was perhaps right in its suggestion that much of the damage that was done to the sector in the First Quality War was self-inflicted: universities not taking on sufficient responsibility themselves for managing academic quality and standards; members of the sector turning on each other about these issues; and a reducing focus on the overall sector interest in favour of the interests of sector mission groups and of individual institutions.

Again, the ongoing value of Watson’s perspectives are evident.

The golden ageism decrying the development of the modern university sector, with allegedly declining academic quality and standards a key part of this narrative, is more than alive and well today.  Yes in the broader media eco-system, but informed (as it was in the 1990s and 2000s) by a small number (very much a minority) of voices from within the sector.  For nearly a decade such claims appeared to be the main animating factor in Conservative higher education policy, and it’s continuing influence can be seen in the higher education element of Labour’s 2024 election manifesto.

In developments over recent years we can again see universities not taking significantly seriously their own responsibilities for academic quality and standards; how else can we view recent developments relating to some franchised provision?  And despite the admirable work of UniversitiesUK, we can also see that the fragmentation of the sector that Watson observed has only gained pace (though the direct links to academic quality and standards in respect of this are sometimes harder to trace and/or demonstrate, though I suspect they are there).

As the sector moves forward to the late 2020s, issues identified by Watson remain relevant.

‘the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help’

(Ronald Reagan, of course).

I’ve titled this piece friendly fire.  Not all of what appears above can be described as self-inflicted wounds to the higher education sector, but much can.  Organisations and indeed individuals in the higher education sector involved in the management of academic quality and standards, and its external regulation, have often fought each other in ways that have caused damage both to each other; possibly to sector’s standing with the wider public; and almost certainly to the views of higher education among key stakeholders including government.

The final feature of the Quality Wars that I want to focus on, however, is to say a few words about the impact of government.

In Who killed what, Watson talks a little about the role of government, but it underlies much of his analysis.  He specifically refers to it when considering the audit-assessment/review issues, and approvingly quotes the former chair of HEQC that a key element of was going on in the Quality Wars was a ‘redefinition of balance of power between the government and the sector’.

The impact of government and politics on the management and regulation of academic quality and standards in English higher education has continued to be crucial.

As relayed to me once by a key participant (from the higher education sector) in these events, the government played a crucial role in the 2001 settlement that led to the end of the First Quality War.  The first cracks in this settlement appeared due to a 2009 parliamentary select committee enquiry.  These cracks widened in the mid-2010s when it was reportedly government concerns that led HEFCE to initiate a more risk-based approach to the external regulation of academic quality and standards through QAA Higher Education Review.

Even the start of the Second Quality War in 2015 can perhaps be linked to broader political developments.  In 2010 the Conservatives entered government making much of their commitment to Regulation in the Postbureaucratic Age.  An important element of this was replacing existing regulation and inspection with a greater emphasis on data – both to monitor services and ensure transparency.  The ethos feels markedly akin to the largely quantitative data-led approaches that have been adopted by OfS.

And now, of course, the sector is awaiting the current government’s higher education review which Bridget Philipson wrote would:

raise the bar further on teaching standards, to maintain and improve our world-leading reputation and drive out poor practice … we need to be clear that there are also pockets of provision where standards are unacceptably low, which means that some students are being held back by poor outcomes. To maintain and enhance our national and international reputation we need a culture which accepts nothing less than high standards, and which requires continuous improvement for all. This will need a more rigorous approach to improving quality and supporting improvement.

What happens next in the current Quality War, will clearly be very directly influenced by government and politics.  As Watson noted had been the case in the 1990s.

so what?

Where does that leave us?

Considering it two decades later, it is clear that Who killed what deserves the high regard in which it is held.  As historical analysis of a crucial issue and period in the development of English higher education, it remains an insightful and incisive piece of work.  And as well as being essential reading for anyone interested in the history and development of the sector, it draws out important issues and themes that have continued relevance and resonance.

Where we are on the state of the external regulation of academic quality and standards in English higher education is, perhaps, less clear.  We are in the midst of the Second Quality War, and at a critical juncture in terms of whether and how this develops.  To date this War has done nothing but damage to the sector, in many ways and on many levels; and this damage has been largely self-inflicted starting with the approach taken by HEFCE and continued by OfS, and exacerbated by poor behaviour in recent years by a small number of higher education providers.

The potential for a constructive way forward is there.  A truce and peace agreement to end the Second Quality War.  But reaching this point this will be challenging.

The challenges will be many, as the sector has always found these issues challenging.  And two broader developments further complicate securing an end to the Second Quality War.  One is the ways in which higher education (including aspects of the academic quality and standards issue) is being drawn every deeper into another conflict – the current culture wars.  A second is the additional complexity resulting from the way that the regulatory-audit state that Watson wrote about, has developed to become much more a regulatory-legal state.

It remains to be seen if politicians, our regulators and our institutional leaders are equal to the challenge of delivering an end to the second quality war.

https://open.spotify.com/track/40jphMGz6nukYdmHeY6Q3T?si=391ef30a518f4a8e