One important area of quality in which students should be fully engaged is reviews. Both internal and external 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 help institutions and students' associations prepare for their reviews and engage students fully in the processes. 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. Since the move to a single tertiary quality system, our support to institutions around reviews is now outlined on our Quality Arrangements webpage in our Supporting the Sector pages.
In October 2024 QAA Scotland published its Guide for Institutions on TQER, and in November 2025 they published a short TQER Operational Guide for institutions, which provides specific details about logistics to support the review visits. Published in September 2025, we have developed supporting sparqs TQER guidance aimed at student officers and students’ associations.
In addition to the sparqs guidance, we also provide training for TQER Lead Student Reps and the students’ association staff who support them. In the year your institution is going through TQER, sparqs will invite the Lead Student Rep and students’ association staff supporting the review to our training programme. The training will be provided on a rolling basis and has two parts - sparqs will assign you to the appropriate session depending on your institution’s TQER timeline. See our September 2025 article on the TQER training for more details on the event content and see our Events and meetings calendar webpage to check for any forthcoming dates.
We work very closely with the review agency, QAA Scotland, and previously, with Education Scotland, the agency responsible for college reviews prior to the move to the tertiary system. Historical information on the the separate review arrangements prior to the tertiary system can be viewed on our archived University reviews and College reviews webpages.
See our 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. This page is still currently relevant to universities and will be updated as appropriate should anything change in line with the new tertiary arrangements.