Staff development

Student engagement - and learning and teaching broadly - is an ongoing partnership between staff and students. This partnership requires a conversation about how to improve the quality of the learning experience, and both partners in that conversation require support to effectively engage in it.

To support students to engage in this conversation, we provide a range of training and events for a range of different levels of student representative. You can find out more about this in the Supporting Students section of our website.

But partnership means it is just as important to support staff to engage with students, and we do so by working with colleagues in institutions, students' associations and other agencies such as Advance HE and the College Development Network. This section of our website outlines what we do and how we can support you in this.

Our toolkit "Exploring student engagement with academic staff" is a major resource, published in 2021, that supports institutions and students' associations to develop their own customised materials to help their staff develop their understanding and practice of student engagement.

We also work with academic leaders and those in governance roles to support student engagement and develop student partnerships at strategic levels.

Finally, our Student Engagement Staff Network (SESN) is a professional network for staff in universities, colleges and students’ associations with roles relating to the co-ordination and development of student engagement in quality. Currently SESN meets roughly monthly. These roles are also the primary focus of our Professional standards framework for student engagement.

For more information about all our staff development work, please contact Eve Lewis.

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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