Putting an end to ideological capture must start with the Quality Assurance Agency
You might expect guidance for teaching English in England’s universities to celebrate literary tradition, explore the development of the language, and survey our major writers and intellectual movements. You would be wrong. The benchmark statement for the subject begins instead by explaining that the discipline has been linked to “colonial, patriarchal and elitist ambitions.” This eye-popper is not an eccentricity of literary studies but a clue to something larger. Benchmark statements shape how subjects are taught across the higher education system. Once you start reading them, you begin to see not just that universities have been reshaped into instruments of ideological formation, but the mechanisms by which this happens.
Subject Benchmark Statements are produced by an organisation most readers will never have heard of. This is the QAA, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. Little known outside the sector but immensely powerful within it, the QAA writes the documents that shape university curricula across the country. If an institution wants to offer a degree in anything from computer science to drama, or from sociology to business studies, it must design the course around the relevant benchmark statement. Validation panels expect programmes to demonstrate that they meet these benchmarks. If they do not, it is back to the drawing board.
Many people suspect that universities function as places where the orthodoxies of the contemporary left are passed on to each new cohort of students. A look through the benchmark statements will do little to dispel that suspicion. Whatever their subject, students are expected to engage with a common set of priorities.
Some of these are entirely uncontroversial. Employability and Enterprise, for example — most students understandably hope to leave university with a job. But alongside this sit a set of now-standard institutional priorities: Equality, Diversity and Inclusion; “accessible” learning practices; Education for Sustainable Development; and Global and Social Responsibility. Even the computing benchmark explains that students should reflect on the social impact of their discipline.
This uniformity is laid across the entire curriculum, from Accounting to Zoology, and across the British Isles, from Land’s End to John O’ Groats. When we turn to individual subjects, however, it becomes something of a lottery how far the benchmark pushes an ideological framing.
One might hope that a university course would involve acquiring skills as well as knowledge in a particular discipline. Computing, for example, remains a skills heavy subject. Students are expected to master core competencies such as algorithmic thinking, software development and data analysis. Of course, computing students must also engage with the previously mentioned priorities and consider, as the benchmark puts it, the “legal, social, ethical, professional, environmental and economic factors that are relevant to computing”. But the technical core still dominates. If you summon a computing graduate, they should at least be able to make their way around your laptop, even as they pause to mutter darkly about “divisions and hierarchies of colonial value … replicated and reinforced within the computing subject.”
Students of Drama, Dance and Performance are not so lucky — and neither are their future audiences. You can go through the benchmark for this subject with a fine tooth comb without encountering a single core professional skill. Acting, directing, choreography, movement, voice: the benchmark is perfectly content for students to pass through three years of study without any explicit expectation that they master the craft of performance.
Graduates may therefore be unable to play Hamlet or dance Giselle, but the benchmark does ensure that they will demonstrate a “sophisticated engagement with critical and theoretical perspectives” and mastery of “critical modes of investigation”. Perhaps the latter will come in useful if they are ever cast as Columbo. Reading the document, you might begin to understand why such a large proportion of graduates from these degrees never end up working in the profession they thought they were studying to enter.
And so the lottery reveals itself. In some subjects — those where bluff will not get you very far — the benchmark still enforces a strong skills requirement. Computing and Law courses mostly produce graduates who know something of, well… computing and law. The ideological layer is present, certainly, but it does not entirely overwhelm the content.
Other subjects sit somewhere in the middle. Business degrees combine a moderate set of professional skills with a moderate dose of ideology. By the time we return to English, where we began, the skills remain moderate but the ideology is strong. Sociology turns the strength up to ristretto proportions — students must recognise “forms of prejudice and abuses of power” — though at least they will emerge able to design and conduct qualitative and quantitative research. The poor old Drama and Dance students, as we have seen, are less fortunate, lacking the ability to speak or move.
Students are rather at the mercy of the panels that put these benchmark statements together. The panels are academic-heavy. In my experience, the academics who have the appetite for this sort of work tend to be those with some hobby-horse they want to see embedded across the sector, or those more concerned with managing outcomes than with maintaining the technical or professional standards of the discipline. The focus is less on what a student can actually be taught to do, and more on what can be measured, reported and improved: degree classifications, progression rates, student satisfaction scores, and the narrowing of attainment gaps.
These QAA documents are waved at validation panels like Salic Law scrolls at the court of Henry V
Some of the panels are scattered with representatives of professional standards associations (for example, PSRB figures on Law panels), or sector skills organisations (such as a representative from TechSkills on Computing). Even were these organisations not themselves captured — and most are — it would take a formidable personality to face down the massed ranks of academics, the fire of ideological conviction already burning in their eyes. Actual employers are in short supply.
These QAA documents are waved at validation panels like Salic Law scrolls at the court of Henry V, shaping curricula and ensuring that the correct dose of doctrine is administered. The balance between skill and theory depends largely on how ideologically captured a particular discipline has become. But none escape the cross-cutting priorities built into the QAA framework and carried through every benchmark statement.
Should any future government seriously wish to wrest higher education from the grip of ideological capture, it must begin with the QAA and its processes.
