";
Description
We invited student officers and SA staff to attend this HGIOC (How good is our college?) event for the full day, with a member of quality staff invited to join from lunch onwards, for the afternoon session.
The event was designed to help officers consolidate their knowledge and consider quality arrangements within the college to help shape their work plans for the rest of the year. The event also offered the opportunity for officers to work with key staff from the college to build a shared understanding of roles and responsibilities.
The first part of the event was aimed at college student officers and students’ association staff, to help inform them about college quality arrangements, plan their involvement for the year and allow them to feed into upcoming sector meetings.
.
The session supported student officers and quality staff to:
- Develop a deeper understanding of the quality arrangements.
- Review and use sparqs engagement tools.
- Work together to build a shared understanding of roles and responsibilities throughout the HGIOC process.
- Shape work plans for the year ahead.
.
Prior to attending, we recommended that officers and SA staff:
- Familiarise themselves with the HGIOC framework – details and useful links can be found on our That’s Quality! event page.
- Get in contact with their quality team to ensure they are involved in the development of the Evaluative Report and Enhancement Plan for 2017-18, due to be submitted in October.
- Start planning students’ association involvement in the next phase of implementation within their college.
.
Some headlines from the day
We found the input on the day hugely valuable and were able to feed back some of the key developments and areas for consideration to the subsequent SFC College Quality Arrangements Steering Group meeting held on 7th November. To summarise some of the headlines from the day:
- There have been developments in student engagement with the HGIOC arrangements within the colleges that attended. Some were involved in the drafting process, some were invited to meetings pre submission (but it wasn’t always clear what these were for), some had had a good discussion about grades, prior to pre-endorsement meetings which we hadn’t seen previously. We will continue to work on the upcoming arrangements and guidance.
- Timing for sabbs is challenging. We will be supporting SAs and officers to think about their roles within their timescales – importance of institutional memory, working closely with staff members, aligning activity with wider institutional priorities and handover.
Resources from the day.
- College Principles activity sheet - principles for effective student engagement in college self-evaluation and enhancement planning.
- College Outcome Agreements on the SFC website, to help you understand what matters to your college.
- SFC letter of guidance outlining the key government priorities to help you understand what matters to the sector.
- A list of the Scottish Funding Council’s Outcome Agreement Managers for each college
- Published 2016/17 HGIOC reports - 2017/18 reports will be published around January 2019.
- sparqs College Quality Handbook
Other useful resources can be found on our 2018 That’s Quality! Colleges event page.
.
College student officers/SA staff were invited to join us at 10.00am, for refreshments before beginning at 10.30am and quality staff were invited to join us from 12.45pm for a networking lunch and the afternoon session, which began at 1.30pm. The event finished around 4.00pm. The event was free to attend and there were 40 places available at the event, for 20 student officers/SA staff and 20 quality staff.
The event hashtag, for use on Twitter, was #sparqsHGIOC
For queries and further information, please contact Steph Kirkham, Development Consultant – steph.kirkham@sparqs.ac.uk - 07880192722
