Academic quality

It provides our view on the mechanisms education providers use to ensure academic quality, including our regulatory requirements, and what we commonly see in programme design and delivery.

This information should be considered by education providers when developing new and existing programmes, linked to this area.

Our threshold requirements

Summary reflections 

Quality is a central consideration for education providers, and they are maintaining the quality of their programmes well. This is important because the quality of provision has a direct impact on learners meeting our regulatory requirements and becoming professionals who are fit to practise.

Education providers recognise the importance of quality and are committed to understanding and enhancing the quality of their provision. There are a range of reasons for centring quality, including a focus on public protection and employability of graduates, and the reputational risks should either of these areas be compromised, and aligning with internal, regulatory, and professional body expectations. When education providers consider new or innovative ways of doing things, quality is normally central to their thinking.

There are different approaches to quality, but broadly speaking education providers have a multifaceted approach which covers all areas of programmes and partnerships.

Education provider approaches 

There are normally two approaches to ensuring and maintaining academic quality.

1. Continuous improvement –a responsive approach to quality improvement, enabling data, information, and feedback to be acted upon quickly, often with stripping out unnecessary bureaucracy, to have timely impact for stakeholders
2. Cyclical reviews – specific windows within which data, information and feedback are considered and acted upon for implementation in the next periodic, normally yearly or academic, cycle

The continuous improvement model is seen by many as best practice within the sector. In recent years, multiple education providers have moved to this approach, and no education providers have moved the other way.

Within both models, the following mechanisms are often used by education providers:

• set and review provision against internal quality standards;
• ongoing or regular reviews of provision, including learner feedback and module-level reviews;
• internal governance arrangements to interrogate and sign off developments and change; and
• review of provision by external examiners resulting in feedback and actions.

Operational responsibility for running quality processes normally sit with specific roles, many of which were created with a pure or partial focus on quality. Expertise on academic quality is a key competence for staff in these roles.

Data and intelligence

All education providers used data and intelligence in some way, usually to assess quality, to inform actions and less frequently to measure the success of interventions. Sometimes data is continually monitored with escalation required when certain thresholds are reached. Some education providers use data as a starting point, with further interventions and feedback mechanisms used to explore results with stakeholders. This helps education providers fully understand problems and come to better solutions. We consider this good practice in this area.

Data and intelligence used includes:

• feedback surveys for learners at key points;
• internal academic data sets, for example to understand continuation rates by protected characteristics; and
• National Student Survey results, only applicable for undergraduate programmes at HEI education providers, broken down to the profession or programme where this was useful.

Alignment with external mechanisms

Education providers often reference or align to quality mechanisms set by other organisations, such as:

• where professional bodies set expectations for education and training:
  • these requirements are often used as a marker of quality
  • a ‘sign off’ from the professional body is seen as important when education providers were making changes to curricula or other academic areas
• the UK Quality Code for Higher Education;
• Office for Students conditions of regulation;
• Quality Assurance Agency subject benchmark statements;
• where there is apprenticeship provision, Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills requirements;
• non-HEIs who have validating arrangements with an HEI are required to report on quality to their validating body; and
• the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) submission process, and the resulting TEF award, which were given in 2023. Education providers often used this process to drive improvements in teaching.

When proposing new programmes, education providers aligned proposed programmes with internal and external quality assurance assessments.

Current sector focus and challenges 

For non-HEI education providers, recognised standards and frameworks are less likely to exist, not as easily accessible, or not relevant to the education provider, for example if they do not fit with their model of learning. This is allowable within our education standards, and we are comfortable with education providers demonstrating how they monitor and enhance quality outside of HEI frameworks.

This does present some challenges for non-HEI education providers in maintaining quality and demonstrating to others, including HCPC, that they are doing so. Part of the reason for this is that where Therefore, we reasonably set a higher level of assurance to understand how these policies, processes or frameworks contribute to the quality of programmes.

Some data collection is hampered by poor survey response rates or feedback fatigue. Education providers consider internal improvements to drive up response rates, but they are not in direct control of external exercises.

Areas commonly explored further through our assessments 

Proportion of performance review assessments with quality activities / referrals