Taking a whole-community approach to curriculum reform

Curriculum reform is sweeping across higher education. Institutions are rethinking entire programme portfolios to ensure curriculum is future‑focused, values-led and genuinely inclusive. The drivers are clear: changing student expectations and demographics, alongside evolving workplace demands and successive shifts in government policy are reshaping English Higher Education. The new uncertainty in labour markets combined with growing digital and economic volatility point to a new era for transformation within the sector, and providers are responding by foregoing local, department‑level redesign in favour of full-scale, institution-wide transformations. Universities are building strategic frameworks to reimagine and enhance teaching, assessment, skills development, digital literacy and interdisciplinarity at pace.

But let’s be honest, doing this now isn’t easy. Post‑pandemic fatigue, tight budgets, and competing priorities can make large‑scale change feel daunting, even when everyone agrees it’s necessary. Further to this, the real challenge lies in the fact that reform only works when people believe in it and commit to it wholeheartedly. Too often, curriculum change feels like something being done to stakeholders, rather than something created with them. Even well‑intentioned proposals to improve consistency, digital literacy, embedding employability and strengthening interdisciplinarity, can spark concerns about disciplinary identity, academic freedom, and the erosion of what makes programmes distinctive.

For transformation to stick, we need to win hearts and minds. That means co‑creation, transparency, and a sector‑wide shift from competition to collaboration. This new ecosystem requires a complete rethink, building new models for collegiality, to enable us to share and learn from each other, because the future of curriculum reform isn’t just structural, it’s cultural.

Our QAA-funded Collaborative Enhancement Project on Curriculum reform: a whole community approach has developed a new way of approaching these processes. In partnership with colleagues from the University of Exeter, the University of Bristol, the University of Leeds, Newcastle University, the University of Reading, the University of Salford and SOAS University of London, we've explored effective practice in wide-scale programme change and curriculum reform, by identifying common drivers, enablers and challenges underpinning curriculum transformation at an institutional level.

The focus has been on charting approaches to curriculum reform in England, to identify common themes across the seven institutions involved, each at different stages in their own curriculum reform processes. Within our shared ecosystem, we've explored how to build effective communities of practice, drawing out aspects that really made a difference to our work, and the final report highlighted key takeaways to share with the sector.

Several core themes emerged from our work: an emphasis on whole-institution change, driven by desires for programmes that meet student, employer and market needs, with a focus on student wellbeing, inclusivity, skills and employability, the importance of digitalisation, pedagogic innovation, assessment redesign and the restructuring of the academic year to balance workloads and to enhance the student experience.

To generate the momentum, we established five key enabling factors:

• Using digitalisation to support bureaucratic processes like programme approval and create a ‘single source of truth’ about programmes and modules.
• Developing a robust evidence base to determine effective planning and a rationale for change to ensure cross-community buy-in.
• Establishing and agreeing the core principles that would inform delivery.
• Promoting community engagement to enable transformation to be built ground up, through such approaches as pilot schemes, incremental reforms, early adoption opportunities and the local ownership of these processes.
• Creating comprehensive opportunities throughout these processes for dialogue, consultation and support. 

Our own community of practice has shown just how powerful cross‑institution collaboration can be, opening our processes, amplifying student, alumnae, employer and stakeholder voices, and creating space for genuine sector-wide dialogue. The project has been strengthened by the insight and leadership of our student interns, who have developed key resources including guides on community consultation and sustainability, alongside rich case studies from our partner institutions.

Across our seven partner institutions, a consistent message has emerged: successful curriculum transformation depends not only on structural or procedural change, but on building shared purpose, trust and engagement across a whole academic community. Student involvement has been pivotal, shaping our thinking, sharpening our outputs, and ensuring the work stays grounded in real experience. Our project also benefited from the contributions of two undergraduate interns, who turned emerging themes into student-led resources on transformation that will be shared with the sector.

Our project has identified three key priorities. The first is the importance of embedding co-creation with students and staff and embedding student partnership systematically across the discovery, design, and evaluation phases of curriculum reform. A common thread here was a focus on the alignment of centralised coordination with the local (departmental) ownership of the change process.

The second is that effective mechanisms for scalable and sustainable change need to be identified right from the start. Across institutions, leaders consistently emphasised the importance of building trust, maintaining momentum, and creating structures that support long-term change over time. Defining what success looks like is core to ensuring the changes become embedded into ‘business as usual’ over the long term and are evaluated on an ongoing basis. Workload, wellbeing and capacity considerations must also be recognised as central considerations in the processes of implementation, as should investments in digital systems that support efficient, transparent curriculum management and ongoing programme development.

The third is that a whole-community approach. grounded in evidence, co-creation and collaboration within and between institutions. offers a powerful model for navigating future change. 

Now, as we move forward, the publication of our project's findings is only a milestone, not an end. We’re focused on expanding our cross‑institutional community of practice through continued, structured opportunities for collaboration, and we’d be delighted to connect with colleagues from across the sector who might be interested in joining us. Our project has provided clear evidence that sector-level dialogue through communities of practice, joint events and co-created resources, can enhance the quality, pace, impact and sustainability of institutional change. In addition, we believe this approach offers a much-needed support mechanism for shared systemic challenges.

To address the current and future challenges and volatility within higher education it is essential that we promote collaboration over competition. Taking a whole-community approach to curriculum reform has enabled partners to build resilience through creating spaces for these crucial conversations – to promote a new mindset for higher education, building distinctiveness and togetherness through co‑creation, transparency and a defined shared purpose.