ABSTRACT
The oldest universities in the United Kingdom are Oxford and Cambridge. They were established over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, along collegiate lines, to provide the professional skills needed by kings, bishops and great landowners to conduct their affairs. The government was clearly not satisfied that the existing informal quality assurance system in the university sector was producing the desired quality in teaching and research. This coincided with its desire to double the proportion of 18-year-olds going into higher education. The audit process begins with scrutinising the briefing documentation prepared by the university in accordance to the outline checklist provided by the Higher Education Quality Council. The work of the Quality Assurance Group of the Higher Education Quality Council has turned the latent quasi-quality assurance system of the old universities into a more explicit, robust and transparent system for all universities.
