This document provides details about Brighton Students' Union's annual academic quality reporting project. It discusses the background and aims of the project, which were to create a sustainable annual reporting process to measure the impact of engagement activities and identify issues. It outlines the methodology used, including taking a thematic approach focused on student engagement, organization, and resources. Evidence was collected from various sources like student surveys and committee papers. The project aims to strengthen the partnership between the Students' Union and the university to drive positive change through well-researched reporting.

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Brighton Students’ Union
Academic Quality Reporting
Project Case Study
2014

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Contents
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 3
Background Brighton Students’ Union............................................................................ 3
Project Aims ...................................................................................................................... 3
Methodology...................................................................................................................... 4
Quality and Enhancement.............................................................................................. 4
Language....................................................................................................................... 4
Benchmarking................................................................................................................ 4
Thematic Approach........................................................................................................ 4
Our Evidence Collection................................................................................................. 5
Structuring the report ..................................................................................................... 6
Engaging with the Institution.............................................................................................. 6
Challenges Faced ............................................................................................................. 6
Impact of the Report ...................................................................................................... 6
Annual Quality Reporting Developments ........................................................................... 7
Student Researchers ..................................................................................................... 7
Working with partner Colleges ....................................................................................... 8

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INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND BRIGHTON STUDENTS’ UNION
Brighton Students’ Union works with a university population of around 22,000 across five
campuses in Brighton, Eastbourne and Hastings, alongside our partner colleges as far afield
as Worthing. We have offices across our five main campuses and in two of our partner
colleges but have a core team of central dedicated staff that work on matters of Academic
Quality. In 2014 Brighton Students’ Union restructured creating a specific division for looking
at Academic Quality and covering three main areas:
This would allow us over the academic year increase our ability to engage students in
enhancing the quality of their education and influencing University decision making. At the
core of this we will be working to provide greater support to Course Reps and School Reps
and student-led enhancement activities.
Changes to current activity include increased support and resources for School Reps and
through this for Course Reps and a focus on more in-depth studies of the student
experience. We will also be developing our networks of university staff outside of the Senior
Management of the university to raise awareness of what we do an increase our credibility
with them to influence how they communicate the union to students. There will also be a
greater focus on promoting and supporting students to access ‘What’s Going On?’, Agency
funding and other funding streams within and out with the University relating to their
academic experience.
PROJECT AIMS
Our main aims as set out in the Annual Quality Reporting project were to:
 Create Sustainable annual reporting process and policy to measure impact of SU
and University enhancement and engagement activity and identify issues
 Create links with university reporting processes where this report will be seen as a
valid part of QA and QE institutionally
Student Representation
and Leadership:
Capacity for Doing and
Changing
Reporting and
Research:
Evidencing and
Informing Decisions
Staff Networks for
Change:
Developing
Relationships and
Credibility

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 Use report to move university language and policy closer to sector in terms of QE
and student partnership
The Annual Quality Report project was intended to enable a partnership between the
Students' Union and the institution to drive positive, well-researched change and strengthen
our ability to communicate and collaborate. Student Written Submissions are produced as
part of the QAA Higher Education review process, providing a valuable and well-informed
tool for both the institution and the Students' Union to understand the student perspective
and how to drive quality. Incorporating elements of a SWS into a rolling programme of
Annual Quality Reporting reduces the once-off burden of producing a SWS, raises the
professionalism and utility of the Students' Union's involvement in quality processes.
Brighton Students’ Union is highly regarded within this project and is being used as a case
study.
METHODOLOGY
QUALITY AND ENHANCEMENT
We wanted out report to will be critical in tone with a view to driving change and enhancing
the student experience. We wanted the project drive change but also to measure the impact
of this change. As such the use of Qualitative data was key, this was also time consuming
so focus needed to be refined and reliability of collection process assured. We also were
keen to have the student voice come through strongly in the report and as such decided that
use of direct quotations from students was more powerful than the use of statistics that can
be seen as arbitrary and risk dehumanising the issues that are having a direct impact on the
lives and academic progress of students.
LANGUAGE
We are in the process of trying to actively change the discourse of the university to reflect
where the sector stands in presently in terms of Quality Enhancement and Student
Engagement and Partnership. Ensuring we are using this language to frame the quality
processes we use is central. We wanted our approach needs to be Quality Enhancement
focused, even through some of our data could flag up assurance issues for the university.
We want to avoid duplicating existing reporting streams where possible.
BENCHMARKING
We decided to benchmark against the recommendations made in the Student Written
Submission from the 2013 QAA Review. We would seek out examples of progress that
have been made towards the recommendations from the Student Written Submission, not
aiming to cover all activity that has taken place but to share best practice by giving an
example of the changes that have been made that relate directly to the previous
recommendations.
THEMATIC APPROACH
While not being able to cover all areas of the student experience in this report but decided to
tackle thematic issues that impact on students across the University. Through examination
of the evidence from our Keep, Stop, Start Survey, the National Student Survey, the Course
Rep Impact report and discussions with sabbatical officers and students we identified areas
where we felt there was the greatest need for change:

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 Student Engagement: Specifically Course Rep Recruitment and Student Staff
Meetings
 Organisation: Timetabling, Reading Lists
 Resources: IT, Libraries and Specialist
We also identified the three topics for the following year that we would focus on so evidence
collection could begin at the start of the academic year. This will be:
 Assessment Practices
 Feedback to Students
 Student Engagement in Quality Processes – specifically looking at progress on the
Student Engagement in Quality Policy that has been recently implemented.
OUR EVIDENCE COLLECTION
We took a tailored collection approach to each topic area, using slightly different sources.
We did not carry out any additional surveys of students as we already conduct a lot of
surveys and had a lot of information to draw from.
Our sources included:
Keep, Stop, Start Data – This is data we collected during our student engagement week
where we did outreach work on every campus, every day for a week asking students what
the University should keep, stop and start doing.
Course Rep Survey - Our main mechanism for evaluating the course representative system
is the Course Rep Survey. This year the names of 966 course representatives were passed
to the Students’ Union. The response rate for this year’s Course Rep survey was 35%, with
337 reps taking part. The course rep report has a huge resource of qualitative commentary
from course reps on not just their own experience of being a rep but also of the issues faced
by students on their course.
Course Rep Benchmarking Exercise – The NUS benchmarking tool for course rep
systems is designed to enable students’ unions to measure the effectiveness of their course
reps system and identify areas in which it could be improved. It aims to facilitate self-
reflection and consideration of structures within the university and it is also proposed that it
can be used to track developments and improvements over time, we were able to make
reference to our latest benchmarking exercise to show progress that had been made.
National Student Survey Comments – rather than focusing on the numbers we focused on
the student commentary, trying to understand the specifics of what students were
experiencing.
Papers from Boards and Committees – We used these to source specific updates and
progress that had been made against specific recommendations from the previous Student
Written Submission.
Case Studies – We were able to provide specific examples where we had worked with
students and had seen improvements made or serious issues raised.
Sources we did not include:

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Commentary from the Excellence Awards Nominations – while this is a rich data source
we were did not have the capacity to analyse this fully for inclusion this year.
STRUCTURING THE REPORT
Our report was structured to highlight recommendations from previous reports, progress
made against these, to highlight the current situation and to make further recommendations.
This way we can trace progress and ensure that we are always pushing from change.
ENGAGING WITH THE INSTITUTION
Engagement with this project was well received by the University Senior Management. A
paper to Academic Standards Committee in February 2014 set out how this report and the
other reports produced by the Students’ Union were to fit into the quality processes of the
University. This paper sought to formalise and extend this process and align Students’
Union quality processes with those of the University in a way that drives enhancement,
specifically supporting the implementation of the Student Engagement in Quality Policy and
seek to provide some mechanisms to monitor the impact of changes and developments as a
result of this policy.
Members of the board to agreed that where the reports are tied to specific committees they
are now included in the terms of reference to those committees when they are next
approved and that reports are referred to in both Academic Health and/or the implementation
plan for the Student Engagement in Quality Policy as appropriate to formalise the process.
Overall engagement in the process has been very positive, particularly from Information
Services who were keen to highlight the progress they had made but also to strengthen
communication with the union where students have raised issues so they could be resolved
efficiently.
CHALLENGES FACED
One of the key challenges was to streamlining the data that we had and to decide on what
areas the report will focus on. At present even when we have looked at doing an academic
policy we end up with such a huge amount of issues we want to tackle that everything ends
up looking like an impossible task. It will also be a challenge to prioritise recommendations
from the Student Written Submission which have all been researched in detail.
We are also given additional funding from the University to look at retention and it is are area
we would definitely look at reporting on, tracking our impact on this is extremely difficult as
we can only suggest the correlation between any improvements and it is difficult to estimate
the genuine value of our contribution.
At present there is no way of evaluating exactly what impact reps are having in each school
as this data is not being collected at a school level. Work also needs to be done exploring
the effectiveness of current meetings as places where Reps feel empowered to express the
student view and for change to occur. The following report contains evidence of the nature of
the issues that Course Reps resolve and their experience of their role. In addition it will
indicate how the union will work to enhance the Course Rep Experience and
recommendations for how the Union and the University can work in partnership on this over
the coming year.
IMPACT OF THE REPORT

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The report was widely shared. It was posted on StudentCentral for all students to see,
featured in the all student newsletter sent out from the union, shared via the front pages of
StaffCentral and in the Course Rep Newsletter.
The report was also well received at University committees and was referenced in
subsequent Senior Management Team meetings at the University. Following this report an
action plan has been drawn up following a meeting between the Vice President Academic
Affairs, members of staff from the Academic Quality Division and members of the University
Senior Management team. Some key outcomes from this include:
 A refocussing on taking forward the Student Engagement in Quality Policy, with
further planning meetings to take place to look at this in more detail
 Increased resourcing planned in Registry to harmonise and disseminate QE best
practice across schools and disciplines
 Partnership working groups making change on key educational priorities for the
Students’ Union, including assessment and feedback
ANNUAL QUALITY REPORTING DEVELOPMENTS
STUDENT RESEARCHERS
Brighton Students’ Union are now engaging in student-led research as a strategic driver for
our work on academic quality. This year we are recruiting a team of student researchers
who will lead and define the research project topics by analysis of previous data and
research. This is part of our overall strategy to develop student-leadership within the union
and making decisions based on research and evidence with regards to our work on
academic quality.
Our student researchers will work
collaboratively to create a research proposal
on an aspect of the Student Experience based
on the evidence from a number of sources
such as NSS, student focus groups and
university reports. They then have the
opportunity to conduct this research and
analyse the findings. Support, supervision
and training jointly delivered by the Brighton
Students’ Union and the University of Brighton
Centre for Learning and Teaching ensures that
they are developing the skills and working in a
way that is reflective, constructive and
developmental.
Students will be given the space to form the
research question, methodology and instruments used to gather data. Support, supervision
and training jointly delivered by the Brighton Students’ Union and the University of Brighton
Centre for Learning and Teaching ensures that they are developing the skills and working in
a way that is reflective, constructive and developmental. Our student researchers are able
to explore the reality of learning within an institution collaboratively, they benefit by

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developing research skills and engaging in a genuine research project which they take
ownership of that enhances their CV and confidence.
Student researchers are uniquely equipped to explore the issues at hand in how they impact
on students. By engaging students as researchers we move away from merely gathering of
information on student experience and satisfaction; towards engaging with students directly
on enhancement methods and impact. As a consequence of this the understanding required
to drive enhancement is strengthened; the survey feedback question which often results with
a “this is good, this is bad” duality is replaced with an interpersonal “this is why, this is how”
approach, fuelling and informing change. It places students as leaders in the enhancement
process.
The project itself will start to ensure that it is students that decide what constitutes the
enhancement process from a Students’ Union perspective. We will present on how we have
progressed from surveying, highlighting and logging issues through to engaging a team of
students in systematically identifying opportunities for enhancement, uncovering
understanding of those opportunities, and creating different ways to engage in enhancement
within that context.
In addition our programme is focussed on preparing students at a range of skill levels and
from a multi-disciplinary background to become researchers able to independently set and
conduct the scope of their research. The Student Researcher programme will aim to support
undergraduates and postgraduate taught students in their transition into becoming career
researchers. Our Student Researchers programme is designed to bring in students at all
level with an interest in research and guide them step by step through the process of setting
their research question, methodology and instruments.
We will be presenting on this project at the Quality Assurance Agency Enhancement
Themes Conference 2015.
WORKING WITH PARTNER COLLEGES
We are working with four partner colleges that all have upcoming partnership reviews
(internal) and QAA Reviews this year and next. The Academic Quality Division has provided
training to students’ union staff working with these colleges about the reporting processes.
Further support has been provided to Northbrook college between the Academic Quality
Division and the Northbrook college organiser who has recently produced a Student Written
Submission for the partnership review that will be updated for the QAA Review the following
year.

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For further information please contact
Brighton Students’ Union Academic Quality Division
Vice President Academic Affairs
Maggie Garabedyan
m.garabedyan2@brighton.ac.uk
Course Rep Coordinator
Katina Mayo
K.Mayo@brighton.ac.uk
Academic Communities Coordinator
Rich Stewart
r.stewart@brighton.ac.uk