Auqa! Auqa!

National quality assurance policy is currently being presented as a way to facilitate the marketing of Australian higher education. When announcing the establishment of the Australian Universities Quality Agency (AUQA), Minister Kemp said it would "enhance our international reputation as a provider of high quality education" (Kemp, 2000). Universities will be required to submit a self-audited portfolio to an AUQA audit team. The audit team will look at the appropriateness of quality assurance and improvement plans, the rigour of mechanisms to review courses and academics units and the research activities and outputs. In this way AUQA will provide a "meta level verification of the claims made by universities in their self assessments of QA" (Vidovich, 2000, p. 9).

A respondent to a survey on the recent comprehensive accountability regimes in English higher education "vigorously maintained that teaching quality assessments ... were destroying the quality of teaching, but also acknowledged that at least these assessments had raised the profile of teaching in traditional research universities" (Vidovich & Slee, 2001, p. 15). Another observed that the research assessments had not attracted the "'game playing' associated with the teaching quality assessments" (Vidovich & Slee, 2001, p. 14).

AUQA is a uniquely Australian model that Minister Kemp sees as distinguishable from those used elsewhere, including the UK. How then can we use the AUQA process as an opportunity to raise both the profile and the quality of teaching and learning at UWA?

• Kemp, D. (2000, 31 March). Building world class quality into higher education. http://www.detya.gov.au/archive/ministers/kemp/mar00/k050_310300.html Accessed 12/11/01.
• Vidovich, L. (2000). Quality assurance in Australian higher education: Globalisation and 'steering at a distance'. Higher Education (in press).
• Vidovich, L., & Slee, R. (2001). Bringing universities to account? Exploring some global and local policy tensions. Journal of Education Policy, (in press), 1-23.