1 The third annual liaison conference of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) Institutional Liaison scheme was held at the Holiday Inn, Regent’s Park, London on 8 May 2007. There were 92 delegates from 71 institutions in attendance.
2 The topic for discussion at the conference was ‘student engagement with quality assurance’. A questionnaire had been sent out to liaison institutions in the autumn of 2006/spring 2007 asking for information about the ways in which students are involved in quality within their institution. The responses from 52 institutions contributed to planning the programme for the conference.
3 The conference began with a brief introduction outlining the purpose of the day, which was to discuss the challenges, opportunities and solutions with regard to engaging students in quality assurance and enhancement. The day was divided into two; in the morning, the groups discussed the challenges that institutions face in involving students, and the afternoon provided an opportunity to consider the challenges identified from the morning session and suggest solutions.
4 In order to set the scene, there was a presentation by four QAA officers, three of whom are on part-time secondment from their institutions.
5 Janet Bohrer, Development Officer at QAA, opened the presentation by providing a brief introduction about the difficulties in defining a student. Sarah Butler (Assistant Director) then spoke about some of the issues faced at the University of Sussex with regard to working with student representatives, considering what responsibilities student representatives have and to what degree they can or should be representative of the student body as a whole. Richard Kamm (Assistant Director) presented information about the online module feedback system that is in place at the University of Bath, and Gill Clarke (Assistant Director) concluded the presentation by providing a brief case study of student involvement in institutional audit from the perspective of Bristol University.
5 After these presentations, participants were divided into small discussion groups where they were encouraged to discuss student participation in quality assurance in their own institutions and to identify the challenges that they have. These challenges were recorded by QAA officers and notes from all the discussion groups were compiled over lunch to provide a stimulus list for the afternoon discussion session.
6 The afternoon started with a presentation from David Owen from the Students’ Union at the University of the West of England. His presentation was on the student representation scheme that has been set up at the university. The audience very much appreciated student input into the conference – indeed one institution brought a student representative along with the staff representative.
7 The afternoon breakout groups provided participants with the opportunity to consider the challenges that had been identified in the morning discussion groups and offer some solutions, which were shared at the plenary.
8 A very full and informative plenary closed the day. Analysis of the evaluation forms suggests that participants felt that the day had been productive and informative.
Challenges
9 Challenges faced in engaging students with quality assurance were shared during the morning breakout sessions. The notes from these groups suggest that a number of challenges were common to many of the participants. These were:
- how to get students involved in quality assurance at all levels. It was considered easier to get student involvement at course level than at faculty and institutional level
- how to get the views of ‘hard to reach students’ such as part-time, distance-learning, overseas, postgraduate
- to what degree the student representative is really representing the views of the student body
- how to ensure that students know the role that they play and are able to be effective in representing the student voice
- being able to provide sufficient financial resources to the student union to enable them to be involved effectively
- the problems of getting students involved in small institutions
- how to close the loop in providing feedback - how can students provide feedback on the meetings attended?
- ensuring that QAA auditors recognise the importance and value of informal feedback as well as formal
- getting and maintaining student interest and involvement in internal representation
- when is the best time to train the representatives?
- the effect of the National Student Survey on internal quality assurance systems
- different expectations on the part of faculties/ schools.
Possible solutions
10 In the afternoon, the challenges that were identified by the groups in the morning were collated, written up and distributed to each group to stimulate discussion to provide solutions.
11 The following suggestions were identified:
i to recruit and maintain student involvement:
- recruit second and third-year student representatives throughout the summer term
- incentivise students by offering a financial reward
- include the role on the transcript, articulate the value added by the role in contributing to professional development or contributing to a non-academic credit-bearing module
- reorganise the timing of recruitment to have a November to November handover
- separate out student management meetings from academic board meetings
- have a pool of student representatives
- demonstrate progression opportunities of involvement from course representative to faculty representative to institutional representative.
iii ensuring that student representatives know the role, can contribute,
and retain enthusiasm:
- encourage a committee member to brief the student representative prior to the meeting
- coach the student representative
- encourage the student representative to chair meetings
- avoid jargon in meetings.
iv getting to hard to reach students:
- arrange meetings at lunch time
- have on-line surveys
- minimise the number of surveys
- avoid survey fatigue – involve students in writing the survey
- use on-line mechanisms such as blackboard.
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