The Quality Assurance Agency [QAA] has a new resource out for consultation: Enterprise and entrepreneurship education: guidance for UK higher education providers. QAA says that this ...
"has been developed by representatives drawn from, and acting on behalf of, the enterprise education community, with support from the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA). It is intended to be of practical help to those working with students in higher education to foster their skills in enterprise and entrepreneurship."
This positioning of the document as coming from the "enterprise education community" (see Appendix 1 for details) looks like a neat trick designed to avoid the impression that this is the QAA marching onto the HEA's professional development turf. Nice try, but ...
The document goes on ...
"QAA publishes the UK Quality Code for Higher Education (the Quality Code), which covers a range of matters to do with the design and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate provision and the management of students' academic experiences. The Quality Code sets out the expectations that all providers of UK higher education are required to meet. This guidance is intended to complement the Quality Code but it does not form part of it."
Just so. Equally clearly, this is the QAA's Trojan mouse of choice, so we can expect more of these to exemplify QAA's ideas about "themes that cross subject boundaries" [1]; education for sustainability, next, perhaps. There is certainly no shortage of ready cash in the quality industry.
Notes
[1] Chapter 3 of the QAA Quality Code says:
In addition to subject-specific content, higher education providers consider the way their strategic approach reflects themes that cross subject boundaries. These themes reflect topics which may be considered to have a broad relevance to the purposes of higher education and its wider context in society. Where the themes are embedded within the curriculum and form an integral part of a programme of study, learning and teaching activities are designed to take them into account. These themes may include:
academic and digital literacies appropriate to the academic level of the student education for sustainability citizenship enterprise and entrepreneurship internationalisation ethical behaviour
Respond