Compliance and quality are correlated, not identical

A fully compliant department can be teaching badly.

Everything described here can be satisfied on paper by a department whose teaching is poor, and can be technically deficient in a department whose teaching is excellent. The framework checks inputs and records, which are proxies for capability rather than measures of it.

That is not a criticism of the framework, which cannot observe every classroom and must work from what is checkable. It is an argument for providers to hold their own view of quality that is not simply an internal replication of the audit.

The available signals are ordinary: student feedback on specific teaching rather than on the course, completion and outcome differences between trainers delivering the same unit, and what placement hosts say about graduates from particular groups.

Those figures exist and are rarely examined by trainer, partly because doing so is uncomfortable and partly because sample sizes are small. Read over several years the pattern is usually clear.

Where a difference is found, the response that works is support rather than sanction, because the causes are usually addressable and the alternative is losing a trainer in a market where replacing them is difficult.