Back to the future. The pedagogy and content of British university management accounting courses. A personal journey.

This presentation draws on experiences gleaned during my journey teaching and researching management accounting. It reflects on how management accounting courses have been taught and their content in United Kingdom universities over the last sixty years, and factors driving this. The story is one of largely unchanging monological, didactic, technical teaching, often neglectful of research findings and issues, despite their rapid advance during this period. This fails to develop skills desired by employers and many students. It is attributed to undue concern about satisfying professional accreditation; sometimes employment of professionally qualified teachers ignorant of research; and universities exploiting previous high demand for accounting courses for financial gain. However, student applications are now in decline and employers still complain about too few applicants with creative, interpersonal and problem-solving skills. To counter this, it will be argued that some or all accounting degrees should pursue a dialogical pedagogy incorporating content based on Carnegie et al.’s definition of accounting as a technical, social and moral practice concerned with the sustainable utilisation of resources and proper accountability to stakeholders and draw more on contemporary research knowledge and topics. This could attract more students seeking challenging courses focused on contemporary issues and the public interest and develop the skills they and potential employers desire.