New Subject Benchmark Statements from the Quality Assurance Agency are recommending several EDI measures for a range of degrees, including physics, accounting, librarianship, and finance. These recommendations range from silly and counterproductive to ideologically motivated and potentially in violation of higher education regulations.
The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) is an independent expert organisation aiming to maintain and enhance the quality of higher education in the UK. As part of this mission, the QAA issues so-called Subject Benchmark Statements (SBS), which describe the expected standards for curricula and graduates in particular disciplines.
These statements are regularly reviewed and updated. In July 2024, the QAA released SBSs for subjects including Classics and Maths, as reported on by CAF here. This month, the QAA have released new SBSs for eight subjects, among them physics, astronomy and astrophysics, finance, and accounting. Some of the standards set out in these statements have caused concern among educators.
In particular, the SBSs contain sections on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), which offer recommendations that are not exactly traditional to the subjects. For example, the physics SBS states that the curriculum should help students “build an awareness of EDI to enable them to accept and support their peers”. Regardless of whether you consider this a worthwhile goal, it has little to do with thermodynamics or the laws of quantum mechanics.
Likewise, alongside teaching accountancy students the skills of an accountant, educators must also “explore alternative approaches” and ensure that a “wide and diverse range of perspectives is recognised and drawn upon, such as from the Global South, marginalised communities and local/regional/national communities”.
This is presented as an integral part of “decolonising the curriculum”, which is something that academics in finance, accounting and librarianship are all encouraged to do. In addition, librarians are also instructed to ensure that their degrees are “challenging power structures within knowledge systems”.
Interestingly, physics appears to be exempt from these recommendations, having presumably already thrown off the shackles of colonisation. Still, educators in this field are reminded that curricula should “reflect the diversity of people, ideas and applications that contribute, and have contributed, to the development of the discipline” because we must “acknowledge the past, learn from it, and move forward with a positive attitude to the future”.
Leaving this oddly quasi-inspirational language aside, the description sounds more appropriate for a course on the history of science or perhaps an ethics module, rather than for the technical training needed to become a physicist.
During a recent online seminar on the Physics, Astronomy and Astrophysics SBS, one physicist, trying to come up with an example of the diverse history of these disciplines, gave that of “astronomy data being gathered on plantations”. This seemed to be a reference to enslaved people using stars to navigate their escape routes.
Speaking to CAF, one academic present at the meeting lamented the fact that “university scientists are retailing this sort of amateur, ill-informed, semi-mythical account in the name of inclusion”.
However, the ‘I’ is not the only part of EDI visible in the SBSs. The statement on finance implores educators to teach students about “the tangible financial benefits of diversity in the workforce”, the “challenges facing people of different genders and minorities working in the finance sector”, and “the gender pay gap”.
Likewise, the ideal education for the nation’s future accountants should include “questioning the capitalist hegemony that underlies traditional finance models”, while librarians must be taught “[a]ttention to social justice” to gain a “liberated focus on information equity issues”.
Another theme running through all of the latest SBSs is that of contributing “directly towards achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals”. For example, the Physics statement mentions that embedding “knowledge of the SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals] in the Physics curriculum ensures that graduates entering a wide variety of fields are equipped to contribute to solutions for a more sustainable world”.
It is crucial to remember that this is not an individual module description but a nationwide standard for an acceptable physics degree. The important thing is not whether UN SDGs are worth pursuing, or whether they can be used as the basis for an interesting project in a particular course, but whether they are a necessary component of a high-quality education in physics.
Perhaps the most noteworthy element of the recently published SBSs is a section in the physics statement that says: “Positive steps should be taken to eradicate harmful stereotypes and language, to remove barriers to inclusivity, and to challenge systemic and structural disadvantages impacting specific cultural or social groups”. While the statement gives no examples of what such positive steps could look like, nor of what exactly constitutes “harmful stereotypes” in physics, it is a clear instruction to remove certain elements from a degree or course curriculum.
When the OfS recently issued a record fine to the University of Sussex, it identified several inclusion policies as being in violation of regulations. One of these was a statement that “the curriculum shall not rely on or reinforce stereotypical assumptions about trans people”.
Although this statement was part of a general inclusion policy and specifically referenced trans people, it nevertheless looks quite similar to the encouragement from the QAA. As such, if a university were to adopt the SBS recommendations for physics as part of its own policies for curricula, it could be violating the OfS regulatory framework.
The QAA benchmark statements are merely recommendations for the construction of degrees and courses, rather than mandatory policies. Still, it is still striking that the SBSs are guiding universities toward policies that are potentially in conflict with regulatory expectations.
These statements were almost certainly written long before the OfS ruling on Sussex was published, but the QAA has made no public indication about potential revisions and did not respond to CAF’s query about the matter.
We call on the Quality Assurance Agency to amend its Subject Benchmark Statements to focus on real academic content and return to its stated mission of ensuring quality education across the country.