QAA currently has a pool of 82 student reviewers, who will be part of the review teams which carry out our Institutional Reviews in England, Northern Ireland and Wales during the next cycle of reviews. A student reviewer is also part of each review team for Enhancement-Led Institutional Review (ELIR) in Scotland, and QAA Scotland has its own pool of student reviewers.
Read the profiles of two student reviewers - Ant Bagshaw and Kate Wicklow - to find out what it's like to be part of a review team.
How to become a student reviewer
We are not recruiting student reviewers at the moment. However we regularly re-open recruitment, so if you wish to submit your interest please email studentreviewerinterest@qaa.ac.uk. Please include your name and contact telephone number.
Why do we have student reviewers?
QAA's student reviewers are one of the key elements in our aim to involve students more in quality assurance processes.
QAA began using student reviewers in 2009, when 45 student members were recruited onto our Institutional Audit teams. Following an intensive training programme, alongside the other academic reviewers, our new student reviewers worked successfully in 26 audit teams until the end of the Institutional Audit cycle in August 2011. Feedback from both review team members and institutions was positive: the student reviewers quickly settled into the role and provided an anchor at the heart of the review process for the active consideration of the student experience, as well as contributing to the team spirit and the general operation of the review process.
There were three key reasons for introducing students as members of our Institutional Review teams:
- QAA Scotland have included students as full members of ELIR teams since 2005. External evaluations of the ELIR process indicated that student reviewers had played an important and highly successful part as a defining feature of the Scottish quality assurance model, and were fully recognised and accepted as a valuable element in the process.
- As a member of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA), QAA is expected to act in accordance with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) set out in 2005. The ESG state that the participation of students in quality assurance activities and external assessment is an expectation, and this is becoming standard practice among ENQA's members.
- In recent years, focus on the experience of students and on their participation in the organisation of their own learning has grown - both within their institutions and within the higher education sector as a whole. As a natural progression from these developments, students have become more deeply involved in quality assurance and more directly involved in the review process.