I bet even academics secretly have little sayings up their sleeves that have no evidence base but help them make sense of campus and the wider world.

One of mine is: politicians like targets, academics like frameworks, professionals like guidelines and patients…well, we just like to get things done.

Still, given the choice, we would probably plump for standards- something that was easy-to-understand to measure how good things are with the services we use. I stress ‘how good’ because I accept that these things can be used as a form of punishment.

It is probably a collective failure of the public involvement movement that we didn’t plump for 3 or 4 measures of success and development all those years ago. We likely tipped our hat just a little too much to our academic colleagues in those days; good and wonderful colleagues but also a powerful lobby within a lobby. In…