Critical accounting

Your report (Whistleblowers, THES, September 3) that Oxford Brookes University is to award accounting degrees to part-qualified vocational students of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants is of concern.

The syllabuses of professional accountancy bodies have been rightly criticised for the way their over-regimented and highly structured approach has undermined the development of accountancy education. In contrast, accountancy degrees should provide students with the opportunity to question and explore the theoretical basis of accounting and its political and economic role in society. It is only by developing a critical and reflective approach to accounting that students can fully appreciate the nature of the discipline.

The proposal will award degrees to students based on rote-learned accounting skills.

Can this be the same ACCA that sponsored a certified research report in 1994? This highlighted that undergraduate accounting degrees were suffering from "the continued dominance of the core curriculum by a largely professionally orientated, technicist view of accounting education (and) is increasingly unacceptable".

Undergraduate accounting could be "structured more centrally around notions of social science and ... enable accounting degrees to secure a new, more socially meaningful relevance".

Anthea Rose, ACCA chief executive, might believe that the awarding of accounting degrees to part-qualified accountants is "the best thing since sliced bread".

Indeed, but "best" for whom?

John Stittle

Anglia Business School

Anglia University, Chelmsford