We are delighted to publish our new Academic Development Toolkit, launched on 10th March 2026 at the first of three invitation-based events for academic development colleagues within the Scottish tertiary sector.
We’re thrilled that more than 30 colleagues will be joining us at the launch events taking place on 10th and 16th March 2026, including Programme Leaders for TQFE (Teaching Qualification in Further Education) and PGCAP (Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice) programmes (or equivalent) and other academic developers from 25 Scottish colleges, universities and sector agencies.
These events aim to catalyse new connections across the tertiary sector, and to facilitate practice sharing around staff development initiatives that embed student partnership and explore it’s role within Scotland’s Tertiary Quality Enhancement Framework (TQEF). Participants will also be invited to engage with the new Academic Development Toolkit before co-creating activities with colleagues and our sparqs Associate Trainers (students).
The Academic Development Toolkit curates outputs from our ‘Student Partnership in staff development’ project, led by Prof. Catriona Bell, sparqs External Consultant. This project aimed to put the experience of students at the heart of how we develop professional practice in Scottish colleges and universities. It has initiated and supported staff 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 Academic Development Toolkit can help to support institutions with a range of initiatives, including the following:
- Enhancing quality assurance (QA) and quality enhancement (QE) priorities around student partnership at course, programme, and institutional level.
- Embedding key sector reference points* within academic development initiatives (* The Student Learning Experience model, and Scotland’s Ambition for Student Partnership).
- Developing critical reflective practice around student partnership within taught academic development programmes.
- Embedding student partnership within individual professional practice.
It includes a range of Activities that have been designed for three levels of professional practice: introductory level, enhancing your own practice, and enhancing others’ practice.
Resources have been designed in bitesize, asynchronous formats (in response to feedback from the project needs analysis phase). They include an acronym buster, screencasts, podcasts, summary papers, activity sheets and session plans. They can be embedded directly into existing staff development activities, or adapted and contextualised to meet institutional needs and priorities. As 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 or would like to discuss any of the resources, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with Prof. Catriona Bell, sparqs External Consultant – catriona.bell@sparqs.ac.uk.