This Theme describes the meaningful participation of students in quality assurance and enhancement processes, helping improve their educational experience as well as benefiting the wider student body, provider and sector. Effective student engagement contributes to quality assurance and enhancement processes by capturing the voices of all students.
Expectations and Practices for Student Engagement
Expectations
Expectation for quality
Courses are well-designed, provide a high-quality academic experience for all students and enable a student’s achievement to be reliably assessed.
Practices
Core practice for quality
The provider actively engages students, individually and collectively, in the quality of their educational experience.
Common practice for quality
The provider engages students individually and collectively in the development, assurance and enhancement of the quality of their educational experience.
Guiding principles
- Student engagement through partnership working is integral to the culture of higher education, however and wherever provision is delivered - student engagement is led strategically, but widely owned.
- Higher education providers, in partnership with their student body, define, promote, monitor and evaluate the range of opportunities to enable all students to engage in quality assurance and enhancement processes.
- Effective student engagement supports enhancements, innovation and transformation in the community within and outside the provider, driving improvements to the experience of students.
- Arrangements exist for effective representation of the collective student voice at all organisational levels including decision-making bodies.
- Providers recognise and respond to the diversity of their student body in the design and delivery of student engagement, partnership working and representation processes.
- Student engagement and representation processes are adequately resourced and supported.
- Providers work in partnership with the student body to close the feedback loop.
- QAA Briefing on Student Engagement in Quality Assurance and Enhancement
- QAA Scotland
- Enhancement Themes
- Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland (sparqs)
- Student Engagement Framework, Student Partnerships in Quality Scotland (sparqs)
- Scottish Funding Council Guidance to HEIs on Quality, 2017-22
- Wise Wales
- NUS USI (Northern Ireland)
- The Student Engagement Partnership
- TSEP's Ten Principles of Student Engagement
- Evaluating student engagement activity (PDF, 2.35MB)
Advance HE
- Student engagement through partnership in higher education, Higher Education Academy
- Framework for student engagement through partnership (PDF, 2.16MB), Higher Education Academy
- GuildHE
- Making Student Engagement a Reality: Turning Theory into Practice
- RAISE network
- NUS/UUK guidance on frameworks for partnership
- sparqs guidance on partnership agreements