‘Never mind the quality, feel the width’: The nonsense of ‘quality’, ‘excellence’, and ‘audit’ in education, health and research☆

Summary 

The worlds of health care and education have been colonised by ‘The Audit Society’ and managerialism. Under the benign guise of ‘improving quality’ and ‘ensuring value for money’ a darker, more Orwellian purpose operates. Academics had to be transformed into a workforce of ‘docile bodies’, willing to scrutinise and survey themselves and their ‘performance’ as outcome deliverers and disciples of the new ‘Qualispeak’. This paper critiques the current obsession with audit and performativity, the constant and often pointless ‘change’ is that held to be so self-evidently ‘a good thing’ and the linguistic wasteland that so often passes for discussion or policy in the Brave New Worlds of health and education.

Keywords: Quality, Audit Society, Audit Culture, RQF, Managerialism