Circular logic? Analysing the Professional Standards Framework for Higher Education

The Professional Standards Framework (PSF) issued by the UK’s Advance HE in 2023 aims to be a globally-recognised systematisation of HE provision. Announcing both improvements in practice and its own ideological neutrality, the organisation claims to be “benchmarking success within HE teaching and learning” by enhancing effectiveness, impact and inclusivity. To understand the Framework’s assertions, ambitions and ambivalences, I suggest it involves a discursive process wherein context shifts to co-text and, ultimately, pretext. These steps matter because they involve a shift from actual practices to statements about these practices (using forms of recognition such as descriptors) and figures which establish the overtly circular nature of the claims made. Highlighting the fundamentally tautological structure of the document’s assertions and diagrams, I treat it as a “diagram” which, in the Deleuzean sense (Deleuze, 1986; 1991; 2023) produces events rather than representing them. This diagrammatic approach questions the Framework’s empty centre, its neutrality and, therefore, its claim to build spaces where “all learners feel respected, valued and have equity in opportunity to succeed” (Advance HE, 2023a).