What is Quality Assurance?

Quality Assurance refers to the various ways in which students formally work in partnership with the University to shape their academic experience, and how they help to ensure consistency of degree quality. This includes:

• Formal meetings (including Student Voice Action Plan review meetings)
• Teaching Excellence Monitoring (including Teaching Excellence Action Plans)
• Research Excellence Monitoring (including PGR Quality Review)
• Module and programme reviews
• Reports from external examiners
• Reporting to external accreditation partners
• Student surveys - NSS, PTES and PRES

These provide qualitative and quantitative data which give you an idea of how students feel about their subject, what is done well, and what could be improved. Together, the qualitative feedback provided by reviews and the quantitative feedback collected from students gives you and your department:

• An improved mandate to make changes
• An increased awareness of student needs
• The ability to work with staff in an informed manner

National Regulators

The national regulators for Quality Assurance in England are the Office for Students and the Quality Assurance Agency.

The QAA sets the UK Quality Code for Higher Education, which ensures that students are engaged in the “development, assurance and enhancement of the quality of their educational experience” – this is why we have student reps involved in the quality assurance process, on behalf of your students.

National Surveys

The National Student Survey (NSS, taken by final year Undergraduates), the Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES, taken by taught Masters, Postgraduate Certificate and Postgraduate Diploma students), and the Postgraduate Research Experience Survey (PRES, taken by Doctoral and research Masters students) are particularly important for reps, as they are used to guide the actions of your department.

Your department staff will work with academic reps to create an Action Plan which will list the essential actions resulting from the various survey scores.

It is not your job as reps to improve your department’s score, but you can see what aspects of the student experience scored lower than others, and use that as a starting point to consider solutions that will help improve the student experience.