Quality and standards in English higher education

Resources, support and student engagement

Universities and colleges should provide high quality resources and support to its students, to allow them to succeed in and beyond higher education.

They should engage effectively with each cohort, identifying the particular academic needs of each group.

Provider staff teams should:

Continuing professional development opportunities, in-house training and sessions to challenge and develop teaching skills.
Support for staff to achieve relevant qualifications.

Staff members not sufficiently up to date in discipline-specific or teaching skills.
Over-reliance on associate or visiting lecturers, who have useful real-world experience but lack teaching skills.
Frequent changes in module tutors, resulting in a lack of consistency for students.

Students should have access to physical and learning resources that support them in their studies, such as:

Students should not be charged (beyond their course fee) for access to these learning resources.

An agreed approach on how to use virtual learning environments in a clear and consistent way.
Well-equipped study spaces and facilities, sufficient for the amount of students wanting to use them.

Delayed access to resources.
Resources not covering the whole of the module content.
Insufficient referencing on slides when referring to academic literature.
A lack of space to study.
Being unable to access specialist equipment, for example, computers with sufficient specification for computing students.
Timetabling pressures leading to students who need access to specialist equipment not being prioritised to use these rooms.

Students should be supported with:

Effective allocation of time for teaching staff to complete personal tutoring activity, and clear expectations of what it should entail.
Using centralised support teams to support teaching staff, with roles and responsibilities split across teams.
Good record keeping to enable information to be effectively shared.
Using data on student engagement to identify opportunities to intervene and offer additional support to those who need it.

Insufficient staff available to meet advertised sessions or expected deadlines for marking and feedback.
Student support not increasing at the same rate as student numbers, leading to reduced capacity.
Gathering information about student engagement with a course, but not using it effectively to identify support opportunities.
Inconsistent advice about how to avoid academic misconduct.

Universities and colleges should engage with their students about their academic experience.

Providers should ensure:

students are able to contribute effectively to the university or college’s governing body and committees
students are given a range of opportunities to feedback about their course, and that this is fairly considered.

Students have a range of opportunities to feedback, for example, through staff-student forums, the virtual learning environment, student surveys.
Providers can demonstrate how they have considered student feedback, and whether they had made changes as a result (and if not, why not).
Students have a good understanding of how their feedback has been taken into account. They receive responses to their feedback.

Students and their representatives are not present on the provider’s governing body or committees.
Student feedback is gathered, but not reviewed or responded to.

For more details, see 'condition B2: Resources, support and student engagement' of our conditions of registration with the OfS.

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