Shaping the student experience with an enhancement-led approach
Phil Maull
Head of Academic Quality Services at Swansea University
Membership impact highlights
- Responds to change: the Wales Quality Network has helped us to problem-solve across the sector as we work to embed the country's new framework for higher education.
- Gets us review-ready: Swansea University will undergo its next Quality Enhancement Review in 2026. QAA's support with preparing for this review, and others in the past, has been absolutely essential.
- Champions quality: QAA’s networks help us connect with the right people to promote our enhancement-led approach.
- Puts students at the centre: QAA Membership helps us engage our students with quality processes, making sure we are listening to diverse voices.
- Gives us a framework against which we can operate and benchmark ourselves against the sector.
- Puts us in touch with a variety of other organisations right across the sector.
- Facilitates an informal, regular conversation with quality experts to share ideas, explore challenges and solve problems.
This case study shows how QAA Membership helps providers to embed quality as a core business process and shift their focus to continuous enhancement, with tangible student benefits.
Institutional context
Swansea University is an exciting research-led but also teaching-focused university that's growing rapidly in terms of both partnerships and portfolio. I've worked here for 24 years, in various roles, and we're just about to go into a Professional Services restructure to further streamline our approach to quality assurance and enhancement. We're working closely with Medr and QAA to respond to Wales's new regulatory framework, and QAA Membership means a lot to both me personally and the university generally.
The challenge of articulating what we're trying to do
My role covers everything from the usual quality assurance processes to the enhancement of learning, teaching and assessment. I started here as a temp in the medical school, where a colleague running the MSc Quality Improvement in Healthcare programme was my real first mentor, showing me how quality shapes the student experience.
It's not always easy working in higher education, with thousands of different people, and students from different backgrounds, all with various understandings of what it is we're trying to do. We sometimes meet resistance, and it's important to have champions for our enhancement-led approach and student-centred culture.
Championing an enhancement-led approach
Working with QAA has really helped us to source and create those champions, through collaborative enhancement projects, events and networking opportunities. As a direct result of our QAA Membership, we’ve gained contacts and engagement opportunities across all UK nations, and we are better prepared to manage the university’s international growth safely and rapidly as a result.
Being an active member of the Wales Quality Network gives us a forum to collaborate across the sector about the new regulatory framework, and the support we get from QAA to prepare for our Quality Enhancement Reviews is absolutely essential.
Moving away from 'old-school' quality
A main focus here at Swansea is to challenge the 'old-school' view of quality as an extra administrative burden for academic staff and to embed it as a core business process. Quality assurance, enhancement and the student experience are intrinsically linked. So if we have processes in place that don't benefit students, they need to change.
QAA Membership has helped us do this – it gives us a clear framework against which we can operate and benchmark ourselves against the sector, a huge amount of advice, support and guidance and, perhaps most critically, the opportunity to engage and network - not just with other universities, but also with FE colleges and other providers, who have already faced many of the challenges HE is facing.
I would say the biggest change we've made recently, based on collaboration and learning from colleagues across the sector, is the introduction of our continuous enhancement process, which moves us away from the cyclical nature of ‘old-school quality’.
Having the tools to make a difference
Our latest National Student Survey results have gone up across lots of areas. I think we can point to a direct link between our new continuous enhancement process and these real benefits for students. That’s what our QAA Membership has given us the tools to make happen – and, ultimately, that’s why we're all here.
| Institution name | |
| Location | Swansea, England |
Number of students | 21,225 |
Total number of staff | 3,825 |
| Campus type | Two campuses, both on Swansea's waterfront |