>ANY institution that receives public funding has to be accountable.....

That's fine in principle. In practise, a government audit is an expensive waste of time, as even the government eventually came to see with the QAA.

>scramble may not like it, but I think he's going to be very busy justifying his uni's fees both to the students they attact

I don't have any problem justifying fees to the students. We've done that for years anyway.

>AND to the government, who are going to be stumping up the money initially.

Er... the government have been paying all the money for decades anyway. And we've been justifying ourselves to the government for decades anyway.

>Universities rely on their reputation to attract students and therefore funding - if their is no independent benchmark - how do they differentiate?

As you just said yourself, their reputation. (Not that reputation is that reliable a guide, but it's more reliable than a government inspection, which does nothing but push around millions of bits of paper with tick-boxes on them).

> - they may want to do it themselves - but then how and why should we differentiate between, lets say, Point blank and the SAE institute

People have no problem choosing products themselves in millions of other areas in life without the government holding their hands. If I was to choose between SAE and PB I certainly wouldn't bother looking at any government reports. I'd do things like looking at what people in the industry say about them, visiting them, etc.

>I've seen a lot of posts in the past on the forums saying that the Tonmeister course is the only one to go on....why is this? - who decided? - the industry? the employeer? -= how do they know that the tonmeister course is the best?> - cause it hits a certain standard - regulated by independent bodies.

No, no-one recommends Tonmeister because it hits some official standard. They judge it by its output, or by what they have heard about the courses from people who have been on them.

>if the Taxpayer is asked to pay - then they'll (the Unis) have to justify their tax money received...

??? The taxpayer has been paying for Universities for decades anyway! In theory the non-University attending taxpayer will now be paying less than before (in theory anyway), so the idea now is that there is less need for governmental control, with more power handed to the consumer.

>Higher Education establishments better get used to hitting certain standards if they want the money - just as colleges and schools have to.

Er, like I've had to say a number of times, our money previously came from the government, and we've been justifying ourselves with endless government reviews and audits for a long time.

My observation -- which may seem self-interested, but I would maintain it even if I left academia -- is that government reviews are an expensive waste of time. That applies to most government reviews. I don't, for example, trust the government to keep the hospitals in shape any more than I trust them to keep the Universities in shape.

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