The recontextualisation of ‘quality’ in Australian higher education

In the education policy arena, the notion of ‘quality'as a mechanism for increasing accountability to stakeholders has risen to prominence in the 1990s, as part of the micro‐economic reform agenda of many national governments. This study analyses the way in which policy makers in Australian higher education have recontextualised the notions of quality adopted in other countries to reconstruct a uniquely Australian version. Further, the study analyses how this recontextualisation continues from the ministerial level, through the Higher Education Council (HEC), and then the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (CQAHE), to the site of intended policy effect ‐‐ individual universities. A theoretical framework, in part offered by Stephen Ball's policy trajectory studies, is employed to examine the negotiation, resistance and even transformation of the original ministerial quality policy of 1991. A central contention is that the operation of the subsequent 3‐year cycle of quality reviews between 1993 and 1995 provides an example par excellence of a government strategy of ‘steering at a distance’.