Higher Education 16: 279- 301 (1987) 9 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers (Kluwer), Dordrecht - Printed in the Netherlands 279 The maintenance of quality in the public sector of UK higher education R.A. BARNETT Council for National Academic Awards, London, UK Abstract. Since the establishment of the UK binary system of higher education in the mid-1960s, the Council for National Academic Awards and the public sector institutions have together evolved a distinctive system for quality maintenance. The paper has three goals: to identify the key elements in the interactions between the CNAA and its associated institutions; to sketch the shifting balance of responsibilities from the CNAA to its associated institutions; and to make some observations on course review in the public sector compared with the university sector. Central to the UK public sector is the sense, within institutions, that the responsibility for the maintenance of quality is an essentially corporate enterprise. That corporate review process has, until the present time, been conducted through the framework of a national peer review system. However, the university and the public sectors are converging in their course review processes, with individual institutions assuming greater responsibility for the quality of their courses. These changes make uncertain the continuation of the national context for course review. Introduction In recommending, in 1963, that the British higher education system should be expanded (para. 179, Cmnd 2154) the Robbins Report provided a major policy dilemma. The Government acceded to the proposal, but was reluctant to see the continued growth of a university sector, relatively free from state control. A number of new universities were already in the pipeline, but it was decided that there should be no additional new universities. Instead, the "public sec- tor" of higher education was to be developed, with its own distinctive features, to form a separate and complementary sector of higher education (Crosland, 1965). Since the colleges offering higher education in the public sector were not to have their own royal charters to permit them to, offer their own degrees, a way had to be found to enable their work to lead to degrees. The solution lay in the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), whose establishment in 1964 had followed a recommendation by Robbins (para. 433, op. cit.) - though Robbins, it should be noted, had formed a quite different conception of its role (Robbins, 1966, p. 147-148). The development of the CNAA was, therefore, an integral part of the estab- lishment of the "binary policy" for higher education (Pratt, 1983). Yet it was more than this. The manifest function of the CNAA was to consider and