Developing a Culture

A key area of our work is around sharing practice, both across the sector in Scotland as well as the rest of the UK and internationally. At our 2017 conference we launched our Celebrating Achievement publication and accompanying video, which give a good overview of both sparqs' achievements and successes across the wider sector.

Our biennial sparqs conferences and the sparqs Student Engagement Awards are both an important part of developing a culture of student engagement within the sector.  The conference and the awards help share best practice and showcase the breadth and quality of student engagement activity that is taking place across our colleges and universities.

Research is another big area of our work in this area, and in 2012 we led the sector in the development of A Student Engagement Framework for Scotland.  The framework is endorsed by all of our sector partners and is used extensively, both by sparqs and across the sector. Similarly, the Professional standards framework for student engagement builds on the Student Engagement Framework to articulate the values, knowledge and activities of student engagement staff posts.

The sparqs resource library is a natural destination for those looking for effective examples of engagement.  Our Talking student engagement interviews bring a range of perspectives on student engagement, which we hope you will find interesting.

These are all among the many channels through which you can contribute to our work and the wider sector by sharing your student engagement practice. 

It is also important to see our work in an international context, and to learn from and share with student engagement practitioners across the rest of the UK, Europe and beyond. The project, QUEST for Quality for Students, is an example of this, as are the two more recent projects in Armenia and Kosova, both of which come under the European Union's Tempus programme. Further details are on the International engagement page.

You can find more about our Developing a Culture pages in the links on the right under "This section".

Student Engagement Framework

National Education Officers' Network meeting

21 Mar 2024

This meeting of sparqs’ National Education Officers’ Network (NEON) continues our series of meetings for academic year 2023-24. …

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Student Engagement Staff Network meeting

19 Mar 2024

This meeting of our Student Engagement Staff Network (SESN) for academic year 2023-24 continues our series of half-day events for…

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