The potential impact of the HE Educational White Paper 2011 on higher education and professional construction education: professional quantity surveying education in England

This thesis aims to investigate the effect of the Government's Higher Education White Paper 2011 on the provision of vocational undergraduate degree provision within the UK. In particular the provision of quantity surveying education in the English Higher Education sector will be used as an exemplar. The intention of the study is to glean the potential impact and effects on professionally focused education in the 21st Century. There were two prongs to this study, one reflecting the experience of Australian quantity surveying provision to give some hindsight, the other reviewing the on-going debate between professional education and strategic education as raised by Cardinal Newman (1852). There was attention on the changing role of the state and the rise of individualism, in HE provision. Underlying this study was the anticipated role of knowledge in the form of professional knowledge and competencies. The methodology undertaken was pragmatic and employed mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative data collection. Future studies (Ratcliffe 2008) had an influence on the data collection methods and a Delphi technique tool was designed to harvest the data, the use of thematic analysis (Brown and Carasso 2013) enabled the construction of themes. Philosophical lens of Bourdieu's cultural capital (1973) and Bhaskar's critical realism (1978) were employed to provide a basis from which to explore the findings of the thesis. The themes which arguably arose were uncertainty, inequality, barriers, quality, marketization, conflict and power. The findings indicated a withdrawal of state from funding professional HE programmes, rise of individualism which acknowledges the cultural capital of professionally accredited courses and a study of power within the community of practice (Wenger 1998) of chartered quantity surveyors. Surprisingly, it is the lack of awareness surrounding the role of knowledge in favour of competencies which may indicate the schism between professional and generalist HE provision.