The last QAA subject review of business and management found that Quality Management Enhancement (QME) was the worst performed of seven aspects measured. In response, six exemplar schools joined forces to set up the QuBE project (‘Quality in Business Education’) to tackle the problem. This HEFCE-funded consortium is reinforced by an advisory council of national bodies including the British Quality Foundation.

QuBE’s aims are to consult stakeholders to identify barriers and opportunities (year 1), to develop and test resources for improving the quality of management teaching and learning (year 2) and to disseminate good practice (year 3). Each partner is addressing a particular target group – students, teachers, deans, national bodies. An online information and collaboration architecture has supported the dispersed research teams since commencement (October 04); initial outputs are now being released.

The consultation stage soon raised the question: ‘is QME yesterday’s battle?’ and highlighted the dynamic context faced by the managers of business schools. For examples: attacks in the US on the quality of business school education reveal the rising importance of the ‘excellence’ aspect of quality; major growth in MSc degrees in Management - with different learning needs from MBA or undergraduate programmes; the Bologna Accord’s potential for 12,000 new masters-level courses in management in Europe; low rankings given to business and management in the 2005 National Student Survey.

The result is that QuBE is now producing two families of deliverable: tools and diagnostics for achieving ‘satisfactory’ QME and inspirational resources enabling satisfactory schools to become ‘extraordinary’.