Internationally, quality assurance schemes persist despite long-standing dissatisfaction and critique of their impact and outcomes. Adopting a critical systems perspective, the article explores the relationships between the knowledge, power and meanings that stakeholder groups bring to the design and implementation of quality assurance systems.…

While the past two decades have seen significant expansion and harmonisation of quality assurance mechanisms in higher education, there is limited evidence of positive effects on the quality of core processes of teaching and learning. The paradox of the separation of assurance from improvement is explored. A shift in focus from surveillance to…

This paper examines the potential of critical systems thinking enacted through "total systems intervention" to explore quality and to promote improvement in a university academic department. Critical systems approaches, building on commitments to the systems idea, sociological awareness, methodological pluralism and human improvement, can help to…

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a poor fit with higher education and can only be made to fit by major reshaping either of TQM to a more appropriate methodology (and hence not TQM), or of higher education to an image of organisation that fits TQM. The paper revisits longstanding concerns about multiple aspects of TQM from a critical systems…

Quality assurance in higher education is a mess: the "problem" of quality is embedded in complex sets of interacting issues that are of concern to many and varied stakeholders. Developing higher education systems that have responded to issues of quality through a "best practice" model of external quality assurance has produced mixed results.…