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Innovative and evolving quality processes

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 Project lead: Nottingham College

 


About this project

This project aims to bring together higher education staff from multiple disciplines to develop streamlined, collaborative quality procedures and assessment resources suitable for college‑based HE.

 

By reviewing and consolidating the varied documentation required by different validating partners, the project seeks to create a coherent set of core documents that are both staff‑friendly and accessible to students.

 

Throughout the project, HE teams will strengthen shared professional standards through improved student engagement, collaborative internal verification, and cohesive assessment practices. The resulting model will be shared across college sites and with other institutions to support stronger cohesion in small HE provisions.

 

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The project aims to answer these questions:

 

  1. How can small HE-in-FE providers develop a unified, accessible set of quality documents that meet multiple validating‑partner requirements while remaining coherent and inclusive for students?
  2. In what ways can collaborative, research‑informed practice among HE staff and validating partners strengthen consistency, support shared professional standards, and enhance the overall quality culture across diverse HE teams?
  3. How can a standardised, evidence‑based quality toolkit improve cohesion across college sites and create a transferable model that other HE-in-FE providers can adopt to enhance their own assessment and quality processes?

This project aims to develop a robust and accessible quality toolkit that provides clear guidance for staff when creating and presenting essential quality documentation for students and awarding organisations. Many colleges must navigate multiple sets of requirements from different validating partners, resulting in inconsistent documentation and varied practices across programmes. By bringing together staff, students and awarding‑organisation representatives, this project will collaboratively review existing documents and co‑design a unified, inclusive and easy‑to‑use toolkit. The resulting blueprint will support greater consistency, improve accessibility for students and streamline quality processes across the college.


Project lead 

Joanna Francis is Quality Improvement Manager for Higher Education and Adults at Nottingham College.

Jo has over 25 years of experience in education, having worked from Early Years to adult learning, serving as a childminder, teacher, manager, learning support assistant, mentor, verifier, assessor, and course lead. Passionate about accessible education, she now leads on Quality Improvement in higher education and adult programmes at Nottingham College. Her Masters research project reviewed the current assessment landscape within England and some of the challenges faced across this provision across all age groups. This research will provide a strong starting point for the research project with the QAA looking at assessment guidance and procedures for university level study in a further education college.

Partner institutions and contributors
  • Hedley Emmens, Nottingham Trent University
  • Ken Harris, The Open University
  • Ben Green, Pearson
  • Rachael Beasley, Pearson