After six years away from the classroom, in 2025 I took up a lecturing role at a British university. Having never had the chance to do one, I enrolled for a Post-graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (PGCertHE). A ‘teaching the teachers’ programme that upon completion leads to Fellowship of Advance HE, the UK’s Higher Education academy, the PGCert introduces (typically early-career) lecturers to the basics of pedagogical theory. Though billed as a broad overview of various existing approaches to teaching and learning at university level, when it comes to curriculum design, the PGCert foregrounds one approach in particular: a theory called constructive alignment.

Most academics working in European higher education will have some familiarity with the theory of constructive alignment. A one-size-fits-all template for how to design university courses, constructive alignment is the principle that when designing curricula, lecturers should ensure that learning activities and assessments are structured so as to ensure students meet predetermined learning outcomes. More simply put, if students are expected to finish a course having learned fact x or skill y, classroom activities and assessments should firmly encourage students to actively practice x or y.

When summarised in these terms, constructive alignment appears to be both intuitive and nonintrusive. The straightforward notion that learning activities and assessments should bear a meaningful relation to the knowledge we expect students to have gained by semester’s end seems, on the face of it, unobjectionable.

But appearances can deceive. Constructive alignment is more than a mere guideline, a neutral toolkit that can help educators design their curricula. It is informed by a comprehensive theory of teaching and learning, indeed a pedagogical vision, that carries several practical implications when applied in course design.

Theoretically, constructive alignment presupposes that students are in the classroom to achieve a certain range of predetermined objectives, that all learning is oriented towards those objectives, and that the extent to which a student has achieved them can be accurately measured in a grading system.

Practically, constructive alignment sets strict expectations for curriculum design. It requires that learning outcomes, and indeed the curriculum as a whole, need to be predefined, tightly designed, and unalterable, leaving little to no room for adjustments over the course of a unit, whether in conversation with students or in response to unexpected classroom dynamics, shifting historical conditions, or other unpredictable variables.

In short, a neutral toolkit this is not. It is easy to see that in prescribing a particular philosophy and practice of curriculum design, constructive alignment also forecloses alternative pedagogies and practices. It leaves no room for pedagogies that see learning as a relation of mutual empowerment or a journey of subjective self-determination, nor for teaching practices that are more adaptive in the face of emergent classroom dynamics or affects.

A mandatory practice

All of this is made more acute by the fact that in many national contexts today, constructive alignment is effectively mandatory. Across the Bologna area, and indeed in many other parts of the world, constructive alignment is a central cog in a complex bureaucratic machinery aimed at quality assurance, regional standardisation, and teacher certification.

This started in 2015, when the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) released new guidelines for its sector-wide European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS). This is the institutional structure that ensures that all university programmes taught throughout the Bologna area are benchmarked against a standardised metric, which takes the form of credits.

In principle, the ECTS is intended to ensure full transferability of credits across national and institutional contexts, which tend to differ from each other. To achieve this, it was deemed necessary to ensure that all institutions that fall under the Bologna Process follow similar curriculum design practices. This much was recognised in 2003, when the EHEA built the concept of ‘learning outcomes’ into its guidelines for member institutions. The idea was that to ensure continental standardisation, all university curricula should be designed on the basis of clearly described, predefined, and measurable learning objectives.

The 2015 guidelines further elaborated this idea. Bringing constructive alignment into the mix, in the section on ‘learning, teaching, and assessment’ the 2015 ECTS Users’ Guide solemnly declared that:

The academic staff responsible for delivering the programme and its components should ensure consistency between the learning outcomes stated in the programme, the learning and teaching activities and the assessment procedures. This constructive alignment (Biggs, 2003) between learning outcomes, learning activities and assessment is an essential requirement for educational programmes.

(The reference here is to John Biggs, the Australian educational psychologist who coined the term ‘constructive alignment’ in a 1996 paper and who thereafter did much to theorise the concept. His work on the subject remains highly influential.)

The upshot of the 2015 guidelines was that the theory of constructive alignment effectively became mandated. Henceforth, for institutions to be Bologna compliant, they had to ensure that all their curricula are constructively aligned.

It fell to national quality assurance agencies to ensure such compliance. In the UK, the HE Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) fulfils this role. It reviews institutional practice, provides guidance, and regularly publishes new editions of its official quality code. In 2018, its quality code on assessment explicitly referenced constructive alignment. Its most recent quality code, released in 2024, also integrates constructive alignment, albeit not by name.

Teaching the teachers

It is not just institutions that are expected to adopt constructive alignment. Individual lecturers, too, face this pressure. Here the PGCert programme is key.

When I applied for my lecturing role, the job description listed Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), or the ‘commitment to obtain FHEA within three years of initial appointment’, as an essential selection criterion. Today, almost all job descriptions include this criterion, which implies that completion of a PGCert programme is not optional but has become a de facto job requirement throughout most of the sector.

It is at these PGCert programmes that university lecturers are instructed in the theory and practice of constructive alignment. They read Biggs, are exposed to the wider theory, practice how to design learning outcomes, and are observed and assessed on how well they have aligned their courses.

My own PGCert is a good example of this. During a key session on curriculum and session design, constructive alignment was front and centre. One of the learning outcomes for that session was to apply the principles of constructive alignment to session planning. The theory was unambiguously presented as the gold standard in university pedagogy.

Pedagogical state apparatus

All of this is tremendously concerning. Across the Bologna system, university lecturers are required, by governmental fiat, to practise a particular method of curriculum design, one which prescribes certain pedagogical practices and principles even as it forecloses alternatives. The state requires them both to be instructed in constructive alignment and adhere to constructive alignment.

The fact that constructive alignment is, at best, anchored in an outdated theory of teaching and learning, one that is glaringly out of sync with recent advances in pedagogy, social theory, and even the science of learning, is, in some sense, beside the point. The problem is that no theoretical framework should ever be mandated by the state.

Indeed, in what other area of higher education would we accept state intervention in curricula or the official promotion of one theory and the foreclosure of others? If, tomorrow, the state was to declare this sociological method or that legal theory to be the correct one and require all university staff to revise their curricula accordingly, it would without doubt be accused of outrageous overreach. Unions would be up in arms, staff would be scandalised, learned societies would declare a crisis, BlueSky would be ablaze—all rightly so.

Yet this is effectively what has happened with the theory of teaching and learning. In the name of standardisation, transferability, and measurement, the Bologna Process has committed each of its member states to mandate one pedagogical theory at the expense of others. It has regulated pedagogy.

This poses a severe violation of academic freedom. Higher education, by any meaningful accounting of its first principles, must, within limits, be free from state interference on matters of theory and method. When this is endangered, universities are drawn closer into the orbit of state reason, torquing their institutional mission and pressurising their independence. It becomes harder to judge where statecraft ends and university management begins: surely a critical threat to the sector’s very purpose.

Democratic deficit

As it happens, the EHEA is currently in the process of revising its official ECTS guidelines. In March 2026, a draft version of the new ECTS Users’ Guide, to be formally published in 2027, was circulated to members of the Bologna Follow-Up Group (BFUG).

The new draft has retained, almost verbatim, the passage instructing members to implement constructive alignment across all programmes. The chief difference is that constructive alignment has been incorporated into the guide’s ‘key features’ section, which now includes the line: ‘Learning, teaching and assessment methodologies and approaches must be suitable and fully aligned to facilitate the achievement of the defined learning outcomes.’ This directive was absent from the key features section of the 2015 version.

In 2024, the EHEA assembled an ad-hoc advisory group to oversee the process of revising the ECTS Users’ Guide. The advisory group consists of a couple of dozen members, most of whom are senior administrative staff—civil servants, internationalisation officials, or quality assurance advisors—while only a small handful are research-active academics. Two members of the group are employees of a management consultant agency, while a third is a self-employed consultant.

It would appear that in this area, as most everywhere else in higher education, sweeping decisions are made by unelected and unaccountable advisors, aided by management consultants. This is both a symptom and driver of the severe democratic deficit the sector is experiencing.

Convenient alibi

When it was first mooted in the mid-1990s, constructive alignment was presented by its torchbearers as a means to ensure effective learning in the face of the ongoing massification of higher education. The idea was that with careful and diligent curriculum design, university teaching could cope with ever-larger classes, an increasingly diverse student body, and ballooning administrative burdens without suffering in quality.

Things worked out differently. Instead of a remedy, constructive alignment became an alibi for massification, its self-conception as a one-size-fits-all template for curriculum design a perfect tool in the hands of a managerial class intent on squeezing workloads and in quest of a more docile workforce. It provides discursive cover for growing class sizes and widening admission criteria. But it likewise allows managers not only to standardise and centralise curriculum design but also to regulate teaching staff through certification requirements.

It is striking that the aggressive rollout of constructive alignment across European higher education has been met with so little analysis, let alone resistance. Perhaps academics were too busy holding back the converging tides of neoliberalisation, precarity, and austerity to even notice it was happening. The crux, however, is that the regulation of pedagogy was interwoven with these other assaults on the sector from the start, each of them, as it were, destructively aligned.

My hope is that many others who, like me, are forced into adopting it can feel in their gut that constructive alignment is neither a neutral toolkit nor an especially persuasive theory. This seems as good a basis as any to mount a long-overdue critique. Better late than never when our very academic freedom hangs in the balance.