Promoting quality enhancement in the UK the experience of collaboration between national agencies

Abstract

There has been a substantial and potentially significant shift in the UK approach to quality in higher education in the last few years. In England, Wales and Scotland there has been a growing interest in quality enhancement to supplement existing frameworks for quality assurance. In the words of the Chief Executive of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA)1 Peter Williams, “We are now developing a more active strategy for our contribution to quality enhancement” Williams (http://www.qaa.ac.ure/)]. In this paper, we consider the growing interest in, and attention to, ’quality enhancement’ in higher education at a national level in the UK. We trace the rise to prominence of the concept itself and briefly examine the landscape of agencies that have been funded to engage in quality enhancement activity. We then examine the trend towards greater collaboration between these agencies at a national level that led to the formal proposal to bring many of them together into a new national body, which is known as ‘The Higher Education Academy (Academy)’. We exemplify this collaborative trend by describing how, in the run up to establishing the Academy, the working relationship between two of these agencies the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) and the Teaching Quality Enhancement Fund (TQEF) National Co‐ordination Team (NCT) was facilitated. In the final part of this paper, we engage in a more speculative consideration of the nature of collaboration at a national policy level and relate this to the literature on change management. We look at the barriers to successful collaboration and the prospects for future collaborations in higher education policy agencies.