We are delighted to share that outputs from our ‘Student partnership in staff development’ project will be launched in March 2026.
As part of this, we have invited academic developers from across the Scottish Tertiary sector to attend a practice sharing and co-creation event, taking place online on Tuesday 10th March (AM or PM) or Monday 16th March (AM). [Please note that the event on 16th March was due to be held in-person but all three events are now taking place online]. The events aim to bring colleagues together to share practice around staff development for Student Partnership, and to co-create activities based around the project resources.
The events will be particularly relevant to Programme Leaders/Directors for PGCAP, TQFE, and PDA programmes (or equivalent), and invitations have been circulated to key contacts at tertiary institutions, and to colleagues who kindly participated in the Needs Analysis and Pilot phases of the project. Please feel free to get in touch with catriona.bell@sparqs.ac.uk if you are also interested in potentially attending the event.
Project outputs will be available to the wider sector via the sparqs website from 10th March, so please keep a look out for these.
Background
This project has been active for the past fifteen months and aims to put the experience of students at the heart of how we develop professional practice in Scottish colleges and universities. It aims to achieve this through initiating and supporting professional development activity that enables the Scottish tertiary sector to take collective action towards achieving Scotland’s Ambition for Student Partnership as part of Scotland’s Tertiary Quality Enhancement Framework (TQEF).
The project seeks to raise ‘awareness of’ and ‘engagement with’ student partnership concepts across the sector, and to particularly embed these into existing staff development activities for academic and professional services colleagues with student-facing roles.
Project outputs
Project outputs have been explicitly aligned with Scotland’s Ambition for Student Partnership and the Student Learning Experience (SLE) model, both of which form key sector reference points within Scotland’s Tertiary Quality Enhancement Framework (TQEF) and they have been curated into a toolkit of resources and activities that focus around the following:
- Enhancing quality assurance (QA) and quality enhancement (QE) priorities at course, programme, and institutional level.
- Embedding student partnership and collaboration within individual professional practice.
- Developing critical reflective practice within taught academic development programmes.
They were designed in response to feedback from colleagues across the Scottish sector as part of an extensive project Needs Analysis and Pilot phase. Feedback told us that colleagues wanted bitesize, practical, asynchronous resources that could be (a) contextualised for their own institution and (b) embedded into existing staff development activities and programmes for a range of target audiences, from ‘new starts’ through to ‘senior management’, and aligned with relevant professional standards for colleges and universities.
Format
The project outputs form a toolkit comprising more than 10 different resources, including an Acronym Buster, screencasts, podcasts, summary papers, worksheets and session plans. These have been curated into a suite of professional development activities aimed at different target audiences and three levels of professional practice, namely 'Introductory level', 'Enhancing your own practice' and 'Enhancing others’ practice'.
Colleagues will be very welcome to adapt and contextualise resources and activities according to their own individual or institutional needs in order to curate their own student partnership resources. Each resource is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 4.0 licence. Colleagues are free to copy, communicate and adapt the work, so long as they attribute sparqs.
Further Information
If you have any queries about the launch events or project please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Prof Catriona Bell, sparqs External Consultant - catriona.bell@sparqs.ac.uk.
You can also contact our team via admin@sparqs.ac.uk.