Things can only get better

The second day of QAA's Quality Insights Conference opened with a panel focused on approaches to the ongoing enhancement of quality in higher education.

Chaired by Maggie King, Head of Academic Quality at Heriot-Watt University, the panel featured QAA's Head of International Quality Assurance & Enhancement Piers Wall, QAA's Nations Enhancement Manager Amy Eberlin, and Mike Ewen, Head of the Teaching Excellence Academy at the University of Hull, which has been involved in three QAA-funded Collaborative Enhancement projects in recent years.

Piers introduced QAA's Quality Evaluation and Enhancement of UK Transnational Education (QE-TNE) Scheme. He emphasised that the enhancement element is embedded in the QE-TNE Scheme, and that this approach underpins the Scheme's value in the promotion of the quality of UK TNE. 

Based in processes of peer evaluation, the Scheme's site visits explore and support approaches to the enhancement of quality of learning and teaching, student experience and student support, the relationship between TNE partners and approaches to staff development.

Amy went on to introduce Scotland's Tertiary Enhancement Programme (STEP), delivered by QAA in partnership with the College Development Network as part of the Scottish Funding Council's Tertiary Quality Enhancement Framework – which also includes the Tertiary Quality Enhancement Review process, which is also delivered by QAA.

She emphasised that STEP is future-facing, student-centred and focused on enhancement – and that its ownership by the sector is designed to ensure the relevance and ambition of its themes, addressing key challenges and strengthening a common approach to the enhancement of quality. It provides a collaborative space in which Scotland's 44 colleges and universities can work together on shared projects and are able to develop senses of shared purpose and identity.

Mike then explained that Collaborative Enhancement Projects (CEPs) are designed to address and explore common issues or themes that are affecting the sector – and to develop solutions which can have valuable local impacts and whose findings can usefully be shared across the sector.

"The fact that they're QAA-funded projects allows us to get the right people involved in these projects – both internal academic colleagues working on them and working with colleagues at other institutions," he said.

He also emphasised the value of the collaborative networks established by these projects and that are maintained beyond the lifetimes of these projects themselves.

"That collaboration reignites that sense of enhancement and that excitement for it," he said. 

He stressed that, as these projects explore issues that all institutions are facing, their opportunities to develop solutions which address those issues represent real value to the entire sector.

Maggie commended the ways in which these initiatives demonstrated a strong emphasis on the purpose and ethos of enhancement, their focus on collaboration and the sharing of good practice, their benefits to the wider sector as well as their participating institutions, and the value of ensuring that partnerships with students are embedded in the heart of all their work.