National Developments
QAA Statement
The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) has kindly supplied SPA with the note shown below on Outcomes Papers and their implications for admissions professionals. If you have any comments on or questions about the Papers, please contact the QAA directly. If you consider that any of the points below affect good practice in admissions, recruitment or widening participation and you think that SPA should take up or consider any of the issues raised, please get in touch with us at enquiries@spa.ac.uk.
'Outcomes from institutional audit. Papers of interest to admissions professionals'
The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) publishes short thematic briefing papers based on analysis of reports as they appear during the course of an audit or review cycle. This is to provide institutions, their staff and students, and other stakeholders in higher education with information about the emerging broad findings of audit and review activity.
The papers analyse and discuss aspects of the work of institutions as they are described and evaluated in the institutional audit and review reports. Recurring themes within the features of good practice and recommendations identified in the reports are discussed. As well as indicating difficulties commonly encountered by institutions, practice which is improving the management of quality or academic standards or learning and teaching is highlighted, as a stimulus for reflection. It should be emphasised that features of good practice should be considered in their proper institutional context, and that each is perhaps best viewed as a stimulus to reflection and further development rather than as a model for emulation.
The second series of Outcomes from institutional audit uses evidence from the 59 audit reports published between December 2004 and August 2006. In this series, three papers have recently been published which will be of particular interest to professionals involved in admissions to higher education.
The paper on Recruitment and admission of students identified institutional strengths in outreach activity, the use of management information systems to monitor recruitment and admissions, and the care with which procedures for admitting students had been carried out. The audit reports also provide evidence that most students were satisfied that the information they received as applicants to an institution had been fair, accurate and comprehensive.
Aspects of the findings of this paper are discussed in more depth in two further papers: Institutions' arrangements to support widening participation and access to higher education and Progression and completion statistics. The former found that many institutions have a strategic commitment to improving access and widening participation, with evidence at both central and local levels of numerous initiatives designed to raise aspiration and attract applications from groups currently under-represented in higher education. This is supported by measures to improve student retention and the provision of a wide range of academic and personal support for diverse communities of students.
In addition, institutions are making steady progress towards developing satisfactory arrangements to gather and analyse data on student progression and completion but considerable work remains to be done to enable them to obtain full strategic value from the statistics available. All Outcomes from institutional audit papers published to date are available from www.qaa.ac.uk/reviews/institutionalAudit/outcomes/outcomes1.asp To be notified of the publication of future papers, subscribe to the fortnightly QAA news alert - see www.qaa.ac.uk/news/list.asp.
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Reviewed: September 2009