Catalogue description Records of the Higher Education Quality Council

The Higher Education Quality Council was established in May 1992 by the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals (CVCP), the Committee of Directors of Polytechnics, the Conference of Scottish Centrally Funded Colleges (CSCFC), and the Standing Conference of Principals (SCOP), as part of the new arrangements introduced following the Further and Higher Education Act 1992. The remit of the Council was to contribute to the maintenance and improvement of the quality of higher education in the United Kingdom. This it did by carrying out regular quality audits, setting up development projects and the production of good practice guidelines.

In 1995, the CVCP, SCOP and the Committee of Scottish Higher Education Principals, together with the higher education funding bodies, formed a Joint Planning Group to develop proposals for a new single system of quality assurance for higher education. The Joint Planning Group's draft report, produced in 1996, proposed that a new agency should be set up to carry out all the functions carried out by HEQC, together with most of those carried out by the quality assessment divisions of the funding councils. The new organisation, the Quality Assurance Agency was set up in 1997.