Money-grabbers are joining forces with university leaders to rejoice at the demise of the quangos. It doesn’t bode well for proper scrutinyHigher education agencies,or quangos, are not the most exciting organisations even to those able to navigate their way through the acronym soup – Ucas, or Hesa,Hefce, QAA … But they matter: they deal with important stuff – admissions, or loans,complaints, statistics. And what is happening to them is revealing about the dominant interests of the policy and management lesson.choose the QAA, or the Quality Assurance Agency. For more than 20 years it has done a decent job monitoring quality in universities. Despite complaints about bureaucracy,it has been fairly “light touch” recently. Once every five years or so it splurges on an audit of an institution; this involves lots of paperwork, admittedly.
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Source: theguardian.com