Course is called to account

Congratulations on your expose of the affairs of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (Whistleblowers, THES, September 3). My further inquiries make depressing reading.

ACCA boasts some 150,000 students, but during the past five years about 6,000 actually qualified each year. And this includes students who make umpteen attempts to pass exams. Any UK university with a similar completion rate would surely be shut down.

Unlike other educational bodies, ACCA refuses to undertake ethnic monitoring of its UK-based student population.

There is no check by the Quality Assurance Agency on the ACCA syllabus, examination or teaching methods. There is no information about the drop-out rates or the number of students passing ACCA exams at the first or the nth attempt.

Most ACCA students have no hope of qualifying as accountants, but according to ACCA's 1998 annual accounts they helped to generate a surplus (before the allocation of central overheads) of some Pounds 10,000 each day. ACCA students have no representation on the council and are not allowed to elect any of its officeholders.

Under the deal with Oxford Brookes University, anyone studying for ACCA exams from Timbuktu and passing only part of the ACCA exams would get an Oxford Brookes honours degree. Oxford Brookes hopes to award some 10,000 such degrees each year for a fee. The obvious losers are accountancy education and British university standards.

One wonders whether the university vice-chancellors are awake to the issues. What exactly is an accountancy honours degree? What will be the value of such honours degrees to employers? What does the ACCA/Oxford Brookes deal do to the value of British educational exports?

Austin Mitchell, MP

House of Commons