Ashwin, Paul (2025) The definition of educational quality in a quasi-marketised higher education system : stumbling towards a knowledge crisis. Oxford Review of Education, 51 (6). pp. 851-867. ISSN 0305-4985
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
In this article, I examine the definition of educational quality in the English higher education system. I examine three phases in the measurement of educational quality, each prompted by the report of an independent review of the English higher education system: the Dearing, Browne, and Augar Reports. I analysed the texts of these independent reports, the government responses to these reports, and the strategies of the public body responsible for co-ordinating the English higher education system developed following the reviews. In all three phases, English higher education was a quasi-marketised system, but over time educational quality was increasingly defined in terms of employment outcomes. I argue that these changes led to the hollowing out of the definition of educational quality. They also provoked an educational knowledge crisis by removing the relationships that students develop with structured bodies of knowledge as the key educational outcome of higher education. I examine what is needed to challenge this fundamentally un-educational way of defining educational quality in English higher education.