There has been, and remains, much criticism of the external monitoring of the quality of universities' learning and teaching by bodies such as the QAA largely on the grounds that it is essentially a bureaucratic collection of data that does little, if anything, to help in improving or enhancing the learning and teaching. In this article, while recognizing the force of much of this criticism, we argue that external monitoring of quality can be related to enhancement if incorporated into the university's own well-developed procedures for monitoring and enhancement and if the university has specialist staff who are not distinct from but closely involved in the development of its academic work.