The RES is more than likely to consider itself a stakeholder, if it bothers to engage with these plans, but I’d suggest the latter is unlikely in view of its record.

Also in view of its record, should it be *allowed* to have a voice, given that its annual conference would probably fail all the proposed accreditation criteria.

There is also the question of the accreditation board (or final assessment board). In the first instance I feel this could be the board itself. Or it could be the experts body, which would then leave the board to be the appeals body, in the event of there being any.

But I see challenges in
1. securing the involvement of a sufficiently diverse stakeholder group, especially those whose stake in, knowledge of, or ability to influence outcomes are relatively low.
2. ensuring that Board is responsive to and is effective in advancing the interests of many, diverse and often diffuse stakeholders.

In my experience of governance arrangements for special purpose partnerships (admittedly local and regional rather than international), overcoming the pitfalls associated with these twin-challenges require being very careful from the outset to map the interests, perspectives and relative influence of stakeholders (rather than just listing the large and obvious ones), and ensuring that the Stakeholder Body can capture them (e.g. by setting up bespoke communication channels for harder to reach stakeholder groups). Similar attention needs to be placed on how Board members are selected. (In my experience both election by members of the special purpose community and criteria led approaches have their drawbacks.)

I agree with Kevin’s last point, perhaps trade union representatives or representatives from research institutions so as to signal that teaching pluralism is directly linked with the research frontier in practice.

Having to many of the same people on both boards and as experts or stakeholders could perhaps yield some legitimacy issues seen from the outside. A club checking itself sort of. This might be difficult in practice initially, but it should be a long-term goal. It would also mean that more people were involved.

Thanks for all the good work!

I would imagine that the RES might consider themselves stakeholders, not to mention the Treasury and perhaps the BoE. On top of that, perhaps think tanks which paractice pluralisam (e.g. NEF).

On the experts side, we ought also to have practitioners.