My starting point is a wish to provide a quality experience that facilitates students’ mastery of the skills they, employers and educationalists desire. An essential part of confirming the quality potentially afforded by the world of learning is clarity of definition. I argue that central measurement and control of quality is neither effective nor necessary. As Harvey (2005) reveals in his history and critique of quality evaluation in higher education, the moves towards standards, benchmarking, codes of practices and qualification frameworks may have distanced us from, rather than returned us to, “an integrated process of mutual trust that prioritizes improvement in learning” (2005, p. 274). According to Harvey, current quality assurance processes point to a future for learning, which is “not a real engagement with learning, but the advent of more complex evaluation procedures: in that setting it is unlikely that the quality in student experience will improve” (2005, p. 274). This rush for transparency has meant that the prize, the “what-for” of quality, has been lost to its own image. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011.
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