4. The national subject benchmarks and the QA infrastructure

The first essential thing to be addressed in designing a curriculum is to ensure compliance with the requirements of the QAA, which is the regulatory body charged with the responsibility of upholding quality and standards in universities and colleges. QAA does this through its Quality Code, which ‘sets out the Expectations all providers of UK education are required to meet’.^[1] For the present purposes, the most important parts of the Quality Code relate to the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications (FHEQ), subject benchmark statements, programme specifications and programme approval. Many, if not all, of the steps needed to ensure compliance will be imposed on disciplines through the medium of institutional procedures.