One important area of quality in which students should be fully engaged is reviews. Both internal, Institution-led Review processes and institutional reviews led by the sector are hugely important in helping universities and colleges improve their learning experience.
The student view, in turn, is crucial to informing reviews, and student representatives have a key role to play in both preparing for reviews and helping address action points that come out of them.
sparqs provides a lot of support to both the university and college sectors to help institutions and students' associations prepare for their reviews and engage students fully in the processes. In doing so, we work very closely with the Scottish office of the university review agency QAA, and with the college review agency Education Scotland. Our Student Engagement Analysis Workshop is one tool by which we can support institutions to reflect on their tools of student engagement in review and self-evaluation, and both prepare for such activity as well as respond to outcomes from it.
This work to help institutions and students' associations with their reviews is distinct from our activity at the national level to help shape the review processes as a whole. You can find more about that work on our Quality arrangements webpage in our Supporting the Sector pages.
In this section of our website on supporting reviews, some of the pages are currently more for background/historical information, while the sector undergoes a period of change, moving towards a tertiary quality system.
The pages on University reviews and College reviews outline the current arrangements in place, along with information on the previous review arrangements for reference.
See the page on Institution-led Reviews for information around the process for universities managing their own periodic internal reviews - such as for subject areas, support services or cross-institutional themes.
