Acting with confidence in a changing sector
Jayne Langlands
Interim Head of Academic Quality and Partnerships
University of Salford
Membership impact highlights
- Access to shared expertise and peer-tested approaches avoids the need to tackle each new quality challenge from scratch.
- Collaborative membership community offers the chance to contribute to shared practice as well as learn from others.
- Networking communities open up wider sector conversations and opportunities to hear how similar challenges are being approached elsewhere and in different contexts.
- Member resources help to streamline quality processes and reduce the administrative burden on quality teams.
- Policy briefings, horizon-scanning and thematic analyses offer early, authoritative intelligence on what’s changing and what that means in practice, making it easier to plan ahead.
Jayne Langlands, Interim Head of Academic Quality and Partnerships at the University of Salford, reflects on how QAA membership helps her to navigate change in an evolving sector - drawing together valuable intelligence and shared experience to respond quickly to challenges while making sure developments are proportionate and meaningful.
I have worked at the University of Salford for over 21 years, and like many people in academic quality, I didn’t necessarily set out thinking this would be my long-term career. Over time, though, I have really come to appreciate just how central quality is to everything we do - not just in terms of processes, but in shaping the student experience.
What has changed most over those 21 years is the pace of the sector. The challenges we are dealing with now, whether it is shifting regulatory expectations or large-scale curriculum change, can come quickly, and there is an expectation that we respond just as quickly, often with incomplete information. That is where QAA membership has made a real difference for me.
From working in isolation to working as part of a sector
Earlier in my career, responding to new challenges often meant starting from scratch. We would gather information, speak to a few contacts, and try to work out whether our approach felt about right, and sometimes that took longer than we would have liked.
There is something really reassuring about knowing that whatever challenge we are facing, other institutions are working through similar issues, and that QAA brings that thinking together into something we can use. It means we are not constantly reinventing the wheel, which, in a busy environment, makes a bigger difference than you might expect.
Responding quickly - and with more clarity
A good example of this for us at Salford has been the work we have been doing to streamline our quality processes and approach to curriculum change. Like many institutions, we have needed to move at pace while making sure what we are putting in place is proportionate and meaningful.
QAA guidance and sector discussion have given us a really helpful starting point. We are not beginning from a blank page - we can look at how others have approached similar challenges, sense-check our thinking, and then adapt it to fit our own context. That makes the process far more manageable and gives more confidence in the decisions we make.
Learning through collaboration - and contributing back
Through the curriculum transformation work, colleagues have contributed to sector-wide discussions about how institutions approach large-scale change, including participating in a round table with other universities sharing their experiences and, importantly, what hasn’t worked as well.
We have also been part of a project that developed a student–staff partnership toolkit, working with colleagues across the sector to produce something practical that others can use.
Sharing experience and learning from others
QAA has also given me opportunities to engage beyond Salford. Presenting at the QAA International Insights Network was a really useful experience. It gave me the chance to talk about what we are doing here, but also to hear how similar challenges are being approached elsewhere, often in quite different contexts. Those conversations stay with you. They remind you that most of us are dealing with similar issues, even if the detail looks slightly different, and that it is often that shared thinking that helps you move things forward.
Making quality feel more meaningful
Internally, we have been using QAA resources to take a step back and look at how we do things.
Like many institutions, we have been trying to streamline our quality processes to make them proportionate and more useful, rather than simply adding burden. The Quality Code has been really helpful here, giving us a clear framework to work from.
Over time, that has helped shift the conversation. Quality feels less like an administrative exercise and more like something that genuinely supports enhancement, which is where I believe it adds the most value.
Looking ahead with more confidence
The other thing QAA provides is that sense of what is coming next.
The briefings, thematic work and horizon-scanning do not just outline what is happening; they help us understand what it means in practice. That makes it much easier to plan ahead, rather than constantly responding under pressure, which is often where many of us would otherwise find ourselves.
Final reflections
After 21 years at Salford, I know how challenging it can be to navigate change in higher education.
What QAA membership offers is something simple, but really important: it connects us to the sector.
It means we do not have to start from scratch.
It helps us use our time and resource more effectively.
And it gives us the confidence to act when things change, which they inevitably do.