Beyond the Green Paper architecture: we still need QAA

By Paul Greatrix. Gordon McKenzie, writing here on Wonkhe, noted that the Green Paper proposals gave the shiny new Office for Students responsibility for quality assurance and the new Teaching Excellence Framework but a key question remained:

should the Office for Students carry out these functions itself or have the power to contract them out to separate bodies? This question places the future of QAA, HESA and perhaps HEA, all of them sector owned bodies, in the balance. The Green Paper is suitably tentative, recognising the “benefits of maintaining a co-regulated approach, the role that other bodies play in supporting wider decisions, for example in providing educational oversight on Tier 4 licence applications, and the UK-wide role”.

A lot of the discussion on the Office for Students (OfS) has focused on what Question 18 in the BIS consultation describes as the “higher education architecture”. More...