WEEKEND READING: Points of convergence: the evolution of the UK Quality Code

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Andy Smith, Quality and Standards Manager, QAA.

The key reference points underpinning quality and standards for the UK higher education sector – the Frameworks for Higher Education Qualifications, Subject Benchmarks Statements, Characteristics Statements and the Quality Code – have long since established a coherence and consistency of shared understanding, expectations, principles and practice. Curated by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), these documents are crucially owned by the sector itself and co-created by colleagues across the four nations of the United Kingdom. They’ve become so central to our practices that it’s hard now to imagine how UK higher education could ever have worked – or indeed now could work – without them.

As we mark the publication of the full and comprehensive set of collections of Advice & Guidance to accompany the 2024 iteration of the UK Quality Code for Higher Education, it’s worth taking a moment to think back to the point at which their development began – a time of a very different and rather less expansive and inclusive higher education landscape – and to reflect upon the policy ambitions for participation in a consistently and reliably high-quality learning environment which this work has fundamentally supported.

Back in July 1997, Sir Ron Dearing’s National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (NCIHE) published some fundamental proposals for higher education in the UK. At the same time, a committee chaired by Sir Ron Garrick had examined similar changes in the Scottish higher education system. It was out of those two reports that QAA was established that year.

The Dearing report offered a vision for education promoting the development of a ‘learning society’ that would see a massive expansion of student numbers into the higher education system and focus on the ’pursuit of quality and a commitment to standards’. The report highlighted a lack of consistency in safeguarding academic standards and called for ‘greater explicitness and clarity about standards and the levels of achievement required for different awards’. The report identified the delicate balancing act required between institutional diversity and autonomy in the sector while also establishing a ‘collective responsibility’ and ‘achievement of reasonable standards of awards’.

To achieve this balance, the report recommended the creation of national qualifications frameworks. The Framework for Higher Education Qualifications (FHEQ) and the Framework for Qualifications of Higher Education Institutions in Scotland (FQHEIS) were first published by QAA in 2001.

The other major recommendation of the Dearing report was for QAA to develop a ‘code of practice which every institution should be required formally to adopt, by 2001/02, as a condition of public funding’. This code of practice later became central to an ‘Academic Infrastructure’ – an overarching system that set out the key frameworks for maintaining academic standards and for how autonomous institutions were to embed nationally agreed benchmarks and reference points into their internal mechanisms for assuring quality and enhancing the student experience.

The development of the Academic Infrastructure and its role in supporting a shared understanding of academic standards and quality was to form the foundation of the new arrangements for quality assurance and institutional audit in UK higher education post-1997.

The Further and Higher Education Act 1992 had previously required funding councils to assess the quality of education provided by institutions that received their funding – and this had been conducted through parallel processes of quality audit and assessment. These processes were later combined and consolidated by the establishment of QAA, and by its launch in 2003 of a cyclical institutional review method for English higher education institutions supported by the Academic Infrastructure to assess the reliability of standards.

Articulated through its Code of Practice, alongside the Qualifications Frameworks and Subject Benchmark Statements, the Academic Infrastructure was developed and published over a period of ten years. By 2010, QAA’s own evaluation of the Academic Infrastructure found that the Academic Infrastructure had, for the first time, brought to higher education a ‘consistent approach’ and ‘a common vocabulary about academic standards and quality’.

The original Code of Practice was not short: it ran to 175 precepts and 258 pages. It didn’t prescribe specifications for how providers were to meet its precepts, but set out how providers could assure themselves that they were making consistent decisions in the student interest and how they could work effectively to continually enhance the student experience.  

QAA’s 2010 review of the Academic Infrastructure had put forward a number of proposals that would result in the development of the first iteration of the Quality Code – most notably that QAA should

‘clearly set out which components of the Academic Infrastructure are essential requirements for higher education providers when they are setting and maintaining the academic standards for which they are responsible’.

Providers were most interested in meeting those essential requirements in managing the quality of the student learning experience, as well as establishing greater clarity on how the Academic Infrastructure linked to European frameworks and how review processes related directly to the precepts.

Published in October 2010, following the formation of the Conservative-LibDem coalition government, and prior to the introduction in England of increased tuition fees, Lord Browne’s highly influential report on ‘securing a sustainable future for higher education’ had recommended the promotion of ‘genuine competition for students between institutions’ – and had advised that ‘to safeguard this approach… the HE Council enforces minimum standards of quality’.

It was during the resulting period of significant sectoral change that the various sections of the first edition of the Quality Code were published, between 2012 and 2015.

The application of the original Quality Code had varied in relation to the different review methods in place across the UK. This difference in approaches had become more pronounced by the point that the Quality Code underwent extensive revision in 2017-18, partly as a result of shifts in how the English sector was regulated, and opened up wider debates around the divergence of quality assessment and enhancement mechanisms across the four nations of the UK.

The second edition of the Quality Code was published in April 2018 and consisted of a set of four Expectations (two for ‘Standards’ and two for ‘Quality’), and a set of 17 core and common practices. What had been an overarching quality framework consisting of three parts, eleven chapters, 19 Expectations and 431 pages, had been reduced through a process of consultation and refinement to one side of A4.

While this iteration of the Code, fashioned by the exigencies of balance and compromise during a period of change and divergence, served its purpose, there was strong sector support for the development of a fuller edition of the Quality Code which would benefit from more extensive consideration of evolving contexts, challenges and approaches – and which would afford a more comprehensive and robust articulation of the convergence of the UK sector’s shared principles and effective practices.

We started work on the current edition of the Code in 2022. We published this edition – an 18-page set of 12 principles (each accompanied by a set of key practices) – in June 2024, following an extensive process of engagement, co-creation and consultation with colleagues from across the sector. The application of each of its principles has since been supported by the publication of a collection of Advice & Guidance, mapped onto its associated key practices. The first three of these were published last summer; the remaining nine have been published this month. As ever, QAA has facilitated and curated the creation of these sector-owned documents, written by experts across our sector and designed to represent both the rich diversity and the convergence of shared perspectives and effective practices which our sector encompasses – and to address the emerging challenges facing higher education today.

The Quality Code encapsulates a set of principles which remind us what matters, and what we do best, in times of change, opportunity and crisis. It acts as a common point of reference for all higher education providers, no matter their size, history or profile. It articulates our sense of value, and represents a shared resource and focus – and a common bond – through which we can work to enhance quality, secure standards and champion the student at the heart of a truly transformative educational system.