Independence has to be structural, not asserted

Who can overrule whom, and has it ever happened.

Academic authority is expected to sit with an academic body rather than with management, and providers describe that arrangement in their governance documents. The question asked is whether it operates, and the evidence is behavioural rather than documentary.

The most telling indicator is whether the academic body has ever reached a conclusion management did not want. A body that has never declined anything, over years, is either exceptionally well served by its proposals or is not exercising independent authority.

Composition matters and is easy to check from outside. Where the members with academic authority are all direct reports of the person whose proposals they assess, the structure does not support independence whatever the terms of reference say.

External membership is the usual remedy and it works only if the external members are genuinely independent, attend, and are given material far enough in advance to read it. Nominal external members are worse than none, because they create an appearance the substance does not support.

Small providers face a real difficulty here, since the pool of available people is limited and everybody knows everybody. The workable answer is usually to be explicit about the constraint and to strengthen what can be strengthened, rather than to describe an independence that is not achievable at that scale.

The other structural signal worth attending to is how proposals reach the academic body. Where they arrive complete, late, and with an implementation date already communicated, the body has been positioned to approve rather than to decide, whatever its terms of reference say. Papers circulated in draft, early enough to be changed, are the practical difference between a governance body and a notification mechanism.