What is quality in higher education?

For higher education in the UK, the Government is committed to an overt link between quality assessment and funding desicions. However, there is no current agreed definition of quality; and if there is no consensus about what quality is in higher education, how can it be assessed? This book was stimulated by, and reflects some of the debate following the publications of the 1991 Further and Higher Education Bill and its subsequent enacement. It also draws on the preliminary findings of a mayor national research project funded by a partnership of government, business and higher education, designed to develop and test methods for systematically assessing quality. The focus here is on the quality of teaching and learning. The book illustrates the extent to which quality has overtaken efficiency as the key challenge facing higher education in the 1990s. It underlines the growing awareness that institutions are accountable not only to the government which funds them but also , in an increasingly competitive higher education market, to the customers - the students. The book therefore signals the early stages of what threatens to be cultural revolution as profound as that which has transformed the behaviour of organizations in the manufacturing and commercial sectors.