Mike Jones, chief executive of the Association of MBAs, the London-based accreditation body, says that when people ask him what is the best business school in the UK he asks "best for whom?"

Mr Jones says that, in selecting a business school, students could talk to existing students at schools they are considering and look at league tables of performance. Yasmin Aulakh, 24, from India, selected Lancaster University Management School after inspecting UK league tables, while Oscar Salamanca, 30, from Mexico, also chose the same school after strong recommendation from friends.

Students, says Mr Jones, should also carefully consider a range of other factors. These include what they can afford; what sort of study they want, be it full-time or part-time; and the mix between theory and practice on the MBA programme.

For, while the core syllabus of good business schools is unlikely to differ significantly from one accredited school to another, there are differences in depth of faculty and emphases on the syllabus. Many of the older established business schools, which grew out of universities, place greater emphasis on theory, with case studies used for projects, while the newer business schools, many of which grew out of polytechnics, are more rooted in applied knowledge.

At London Business School, for example, students will be lectured by some of the world's finest business theorists while at Kingston Business School and Manchester Metropolitan University students' teachers will include successful local businessmen and women.

However, Mr Jones does have one very strong recommendation on quality - that students should select a business school that has been accredited by his organisation.

Accreditation by the Association of MBAs is the most widely recognised badge of a quality MBA programme in the UK. It is held by 35 of the 120 institutions in the UK conferring the MBA and about 50 business schools worldwide.

These include Insead, IMD in Lausanne, Institut d'Etude Politiques de Paris, SDA Bocconi in Milan and the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration. The benchmark measures MBA courses against criteria such as student experience, the quality of teaching and size of faculty, and calibre of students. Normally, students are expected to have an average of three years' work experience - a qualification not met by many schools which are not accredited.

There are other international benchmarks of quality. The two leading ones are the Equis standard, offered by the European Federation for Management Development (EFMD) and which assesses the quality of the whole institution, including its executive education, and that of the AACSB, the international association for management education, the US accreditation body.

Some 66 per cent of students studying in the UK attend a school accredited by the Association of MBAs - with Robert Gordon University's Aberdeen Business School the latest to be accredited. Initially, this was for a provisional one year period but this year the school won full five-year accreditation.

The Aberdeen Business School, part of the Robert Gordon University, is an interesting case study of how the Association of MBAs can work with a school towards accreditation. Two other business schools are currently working with the association in a similar fashion.

Aberdeen Business School started offering an MBA in 1993. Alex Mackay, director of the MBA programme, says: "We thought about accreditation very soon after establishing the MBA. The market is very competitive and very conscious of quality." The business school started talking informally to the association in 1997 and in 1998 applied for accreditation. However, the first visit resulted in provisional accreditation for one year only. Further full accredita