The first barrier to students engaging in quality: understanding.

Making sure that Higher Education Providers (universities, colleges that deliver degrees etc) adhere to nationally agreed standards and provide learning of a suitable quality is a tricky business. The systems that make up ‘quality assurance’ create a fairly complex framework of procedures and policies that providers have to have in place, which all have to be checked during reviews by teams of external folk.

These processes can come across as dry, bureaucratic and tedious to some but they are vital in ensuring good quality degrees and maintaining the UK’s reputation for excellent higher education – and importantly they impact upon what students experience on the ground.

Much progress is being made in getting students more involved in quality processes; with many providers now involving students on the panels that check departments are up to scratch and all teams that review whole universities now include one student from another university.

One of the current debates goes much deeper and much closer to home though, it is around quality assurance (and enhancement) at a course level – the tangible level that students see, feel and experience all the time – and how we get students more involved in reviewing and developing their course.

Traditionally (well, in the last few years) the majority of student engagement in low level quality has been through course reps and end of module evaluation surveys but the effectiveness of these methods is hugely varied and, it is argued, these are not enough to turn talk of ‘students as partners’ from rhetoric into reality.

External examiners. Annual monitoring. Programme validation. Programme revalidation. They are just 4 of the many ways quality assurance happens which students could engage in but they probably mean nothing to average ‘Joe Bloggs’ student – and quite understandably given that many staff don’t like engaging with them, never mind students.

There is of course the question of whether students need to be involved in all of these or just some? This leads me on to my favourite of the many debates taking place within student engagement / quality circles:

If we want students to be able to feed into the development of their course and if we want to hear their voice effectively when we are monitoring a course’s quality: what is it that students need to know and understand before they can effectively engage in quality assurance and quality enhancement?

Your opinions are very much welcomed as comments below and will help to inform my contributions to national policy development. You could also email me: dan.derricott@nus.org.uk