ABSTRACT
Education professionals have always claimed to pay attention to quality. This assertion has rested largely on faith in professional training ensuring that courses are well designed, well taught and rigorously assessed. Monitoring quality and policing the work of the membership is inherent in the definition of 'professional' (Etzioni, 1969) yet is exercised only in medicine and the law, even then rather dubiously. This is not something achieved in education; there is no Teaching Council on the horizon. That leaves something of a vacuum in terms of control and responsibility.
