University quality healthcheck delivered through collaboration between three sector agencies

Cooperation between three higher education organisations has helped to create a tool allowing universities to perform an in-house quality healthcheck.

Since 2016, the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), Jisc, and the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) have explored increased collaboration and cost sharing for the benefit of the HE sector through the M5 Group.

The QAA-led Provider Healthcheck was developed following a 13-week, Jisc-supported Analytics Lab and has been released to the sector as one of 14 community dashboards available via HESA’s Heidi Plus HE intelligence platform.

'This community dashboard is the latest outcome from the M5 Group’s members to deliver services for the HE sector which help improve quality, create efficiencies and reduce costs,'

said Paul Clark, chief executive of HESA.

'The Provider Healthcheck will provide a valuable resource for HE quality teams across the UK at a time when metrics are increasingly important to their work. The dashboard will be showcased at the QAA’s annual conference this week,'

said Douglas Blackstock, chief executive,QAA.

Paul Feldman, chief executive of Jisc, said:

'The M5 Group has saved universities time and money since it was established in 2016. This dashboard is the latest product created through the group’s collaborative approach. It offers universities a useful quality healthcheck tool to demonstrate that academic standards are being maintained, improving the quality of education for students.'

Other positive examples of M5 collaboration include the Data Matters Conference in November 2017 and OneDesk, the M5 group’s shared IT service desk, which launched in March, combining resources and systems to deliver efficient support to staff and external users.