QAA’s departure leaves English sector ‘lacking expertise’ at crucial time

The OfS doesn't have any credibility amongst either academics or indeed students! It's a shame that QAA has backed off... there's a need for a reputable and competent body to undertake the quality role which OfS is not able to fill. An independent body composed of academics and students able to determine its own methodologies and standards indepenedent of political interference is what is required.

Good riddance to the misnamed Quality Assurance Agency it dumbed everything down to the lowest common denominator. The Office for Students is a similarly bureaucratic organisation no idea what it is doing. Let the Universities run themselves and stop wasting all this money on bureaucrats that breed like rabbits that is the best way to free up resources in the Universities and to improve academic morale and the student experience.

The withdrawal of the QAA from this role is a disaster for English Higher Education. While entirely understandable given the coercive turn of the OfS, it opens up the real prospect of direct ministerial intervention in the academic affairs of Universities, the granting of University title and the award (and retention) of degree awarding powers. The statement from the AHUA is as wise and it is deeply worrying. The disastrous direction of the OfS, with its notorious B1-B3 conditions containing such vague, inoperable formulations as there can be too much or too little choice and its announcement of an unaccountable bureaucratic 'Boots on the Ground' regime must be challenged.