Higher education's rapid expansion is paired with growing social expectations of its benefits and concern on its teaching quality. In response to these, institutional/national surveys based on an array of theories are widely used in universities for quality assurance, enhancement, and benchmarking. This paper reviews three major types of…

In company with other leading jurisdictions around the world, Hong Kong is taking important steps to mainstream computational thinking education (CTE) into the primary grades curriculum. At the vanguard of this movement in Hong Kong, CoolThink@JC is a 3-year course sequence for upper primary students designed to develop computational thinking…

Processes for moderating assessments are much debated in higher education. The myriad approaches to the task vary in their demands on staff time and expertise, and also in how valid, reliable and fair to students they appear. Medical education, with its diverse range of assessments and assessors across clinical and academic domains presents…

In this paper we report the outcomes of a national survey of academic development staff in a range of UK HE Institutions to consider the approaches adopted to evaluate teaching-related continual professional development (CPD). Despite the increasing drive towards accountability, the majority of respondents undertook no benchmarking to establish…

In June 2015, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) proposed a lighter touch quality assessment regime that would place greater reliance on institutions' own governance arrangements. In July 2015 the Minister for Higher Education announced a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) parts of which appear inconsistent with HEFCE's…

This article considers the recent change to Ofsted's inspection criteria, which now includes a judgement on schools' engagement with parents as part of the overall Leadership and Management judgement. The article argues that this is the correct place for this judgement, linking effective parental engagement with the development of a broad and…

The Government is committed to introducing a Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) to assess the quality of teaching and learning in higher education. Designing the right solution is challenging. There is no off-the-shelf solution from other countries that we can lift. But we can learn lessons from other sectors. This pamphlet explores rating…

This paper compares access to full-time undergraduate higher education (HE) by members of less advantaged social classes and ethnic minorities across the four "home countries" of the UK. It uses data on applicants to HE in selected years from 1996 to 2010. In all home countries students from intermediate and working-class backgrounds…

The English Funding Council has announced its intention to invite tenders for the contract currently held by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), and the Australian government is promoting a Bill to curb the activities of the equivalent body, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. This article compares the two…

The transfer of academic technologies to industry is an important process underpinning innovation and economic development. Various approaches have been adopted by universities to encourage academics to participate in commercial activities. Many have implemented revenue sharing policies, through which the revenues generated from university-owned…

This paper addresses issues raised in two recent papers published in this journal about the UK "Association of Business Schools' Journal Quality Guide (ABS Guide)". While much of the debate about journal rankings in general, and the "ABS Guide" in particular, has focused on the construction, power and (mis)use of these…

This review examines applications of quality management (QM) in language education. QM approaches have been adapted from methodologies developed in industrial and commercial settings, and these are briefly described. Key aspects of QM in language education are the definition of purpose, descriptions of principles and practice, including various…

This article explores how power relations are constructed in the governance of higher education institutions. It examines and deconstructs, from a Foucauldian perspective, power relations and mechanisms in the relationship between the state and higher education institutions, and between academic and management staff. This research article…

This "Rejoinder" responds to criticisms made by Simon Hussain (2011) about the construction and operation of the "Association of Business Schools' (ABS) Academic Journal Quality Guide". In this paper the broad purposes of journal lists and guides are outlined before an account is given of the long history and multiple forms of…

The desire to enhance the quality of the services provided by higher education institutions in the UK has led to the development of a series of benchmarking performance indicators to aid the quality management process. This paper examines whether or not similar indicators could be developed for use as tools in the management of quality within…