Student's Charters: an evaluation and reflection

Abstract Contracts and markets are central to the concept of public service that is implicit in the New Public Management. Charters are, essentially, a formal contract between the public service provider and their customers. One such contract is the student charter, which serves as a contract between the educational institution and its students. As such, the charter outlines the experience that the students can expect and thereby seeks to state the institution's expectations and to manage student's expectations. A pilot project that sought to collect a number of charters for different United Kingdom institutions of higher education, and to analyse those charters with a view to both exploring how charters manage student expectations and to identifying some aspects of good practice in the formulation and presentation of charters, is described. The analysis covers: introduction, message, scope and presentation.