What successful partnership have you and colleagues developed during the COVID-19 pandemic? sparqs is planning a report to highlight and celebrate the successes of engagement and partnership across Scotland in this challenging academic year.
We are seeking your examples for this by the end of March 2021, with a view to publication in April, and ask that you circulate this request to individuals and groups involved in developing partnership across your institutions and students’ associations in Scotland.
The past year has seen the sector rise admirably to the challenges of the pandemic, despite the extraordinary circumstances: students’ associations have worked with their membership, their institutions and sector colleagues to understand the impact of the pandemic on learning and help shape responses; representative systems and surveys have adapted to digital spaces; committees, reviews and enhancement activity have moved online and continued to engage students as partners throughout; and students have been deeply involved in decisions at course, institutional and national levels.
At a time when good news can feel rare, these successes should be celebrated widely, and we hope our forthcoming report can be a platform to do this.
Examples of practice that we are seeking include:
- Strategic approaches to partnership at a time of change, for instance through the development of policies such as student engagement strategies or Student Partnership Agreements, or partnership planning spaces that bring together key institutional and students’ association personnel.
- Students engaging in internal reviews and other enhancement and self-evaluation activity.
- Students working with staff to create, understand and use data about the changing learning experience.
- The creation of digital spaces for course representatives to share and discuss evidence of student views.
- The development and evaluation of online course rep training.
- Successful partnership working in sector networks and committees, or the linking of institutional evidence with national decisions.
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Submitting your contributions
Your submissions could take multiple forms, such as written case studies, links to existing resources or materials, screenshots of digital spaces, or quotes from staff or students that testify to the impact of your successful work.
You can find out more about our support during the pandemic in our COVID-19 hub, where you can find the report’s submission template.
Please get your contributions in by the end of March. We look forward to reading about all your good practice!
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Queries and further information
If you have any queries or wish to discuss anything around contributing to the report, please contact Simon Varwell, Senior Development Consultant - simon.varwell@sparqs.ac.uk
