Regulating truths, indeterminate practice and ways of being: a biopolitics of Professional Standards in UK Higher Education

This paper critically examines the professional frameworks for teaching and supporting learning in UK higher education. Applying the concept of biopolitics from Michel Foucault's work, we discuss the Professional Standards Framework (Advance HE, 2023a) and Education Inspection Framework (Ofsted, 2019; 2023) as part of a discursive dispositif which create specific forms of being in higher education with a distinctive biopolitical objective. By aligning and marginalising global objectives and ways of being through indeterminate practice, they extend governance beyond the classroom and into the biopolitical regulation of educational truth itself. By examining the exclusions and silences within these frameworks — particularly those of alternative pedagogical voices and approaches — we underline the paradoxes inherent in these frameworks’ proclaimed values of neutrality, inclusivity and equity, as well as their role in the complex dynamics of knowledge production.