Revisiting Greatrix: quality assurance, accountability and regulation in UK higher education today

As higher education enters the second quarter of the twenty-first century, ‘quality’ has become a major focus of government and regulatory attention. This paper revisits Paul Greatrix’s influential 2001 discussion of quality assurance (QA) to examine how contemporary UK regulation reflects many of the same underlying debates. Drawing on developments over the last 25 years, including the Higher Education and Research Act (2017) and the establishment of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) as the primary approach to quality regulation by the new regulator the Office for Students (OfS), the paper argues that three tensions continue to shape QA policy: legitimacy versus responsiveness, marketisation versus quality culture, and evidence versus trust. It concludes that contemporary regulatory reforms risk continuing to reinforce a command-and-control approach that threatens institutional autonomy, unless institutional governance and evaluative capacity are strengthened.