Going out on a high

The "grand finale" of Quality Insights 2025 – as QAA's Debra Macfarlane, the chair of our closing plenary, put it – drew together some of the key themes from the conference's previous two days: sustainable enhancement, dynamic quality processes, compassion in education, and institutional and curricular reform. 

The panel featured Bath Students' Union president Jimena Alamo, The University of Manchester's Maureen McLaughlin, the University of Chester's Dean of Academic Innovation Professor Jackie Potter, and Mark Peace, Professor of Innovation in Education at King's College London.

Jimena said that the biggest student concerns for the future of higher education centred around value for money, the quality of assessment and feedback, and the engagement of students as stakeholders in decision-making processes. 

She stressed that, as different people hold diverse views as to what value and quality should look like, the sector needs to develop quality processes which can accommodate the varying expectations and perspectives of both students and staff.

Maureen added that the challenge might not just be about demonstrating value for money but be about how we demonstrate value itself. 

"How we measure that of course is a moot point," she said. "But one of the key ways that we might be looking to measure it is how we're developing the kind of curriculum that really is transformational for our students, and how we know it – and do we talk enough to our alumnae about what transformational impact their education has for them?"

Jackie emphasised that institutional and curricular reform is "rife" across the sector – witnessed in "the number of universities that are doing this work – sometimes quite loudly, telling people about their activities – sometimes quite quietly – sometimes at very tremendous speed, and sometimes quite slowly and deliberately and taking a piece-by-piece approach".

"There's this real, overarching, whole-university approach to change which is being led across the sector," she said. "My interest is in the way modular learning frameworks, and academic year structures – and the regulations, policies, systems and technologies that we're using to support teaching, learning and assessment – are all being reconsidered and reconstructed in real time with people who are trying to do the day job and also prepare for how the day job will look different tomorrow."

Mark agreed with this forward-looking approach, but also supposed that the HE sector could sometimes be seen as looking a bit like a scared animal.

"It's gone into defence position – it feels under attack," he said. "It's understandable. We feel financially squeezed, we feel overly regulated, and we're in a context that's hostile economically, socially and culturally. It makes sense that we might become defensive. But that response is the wrong response. Because, when you hunker down into defensiveness, you tend to retreat into the comfort of established structures, traditional ways of doing things, and ever-tighter ways of enforcing regulatory compliance, to keep everything together. So, we become defensive of the things we've always done and enact a load of things to try to keep those things in place.

"It's an understandable instinct, but it's an instinct that will suffocate us and will prevent us from recognising the many pathways to autonomy and creativity and possibility that are still afforded to us as a sector.

"Let's not think about ourselves in crisis. Let's think about things as troublesome, let's think about things as difficult, but there are infinite possibilities for us."