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’.

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Lesley Vidovich

Lesley Vidovich was an experienced secondary science teacher and curriculum developer when she moved to the university sector in the early 1990s. Education policy analysis is her principal area of research and the theme of her current doctoral studies. She also teaches in the areas of sociology of education and comparative education. In 1995, she co‐authored (with Janice Dudley) The Politics of Education published by the Australian Council of Educational Research.

Paige Porter

Paige Porter is presently Executive Dean of the Faculties of Economics, Commerce Education and Law at the University of Western Australia. Her research and publications are in the areas of education policy analysis, federal/state relations in education, education and the economy, higher education policy, restructuring of schooling, gender and education, teacher quality and professionalism, innovations in education, and women managers’ careers in organisations. From 1994‐96 she was a Review Team Member of the National Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.