Currently reading Stensaker & Matear (2025) on “Student involvement in quality assurance: Perspectives and practices towards persistent partnerships”

Including the student perspective in quality assurance of teaching is required by law in Sweden (and other places), and this means that they are asked to respond to surveys at the end of every course, have seats on all boards of education and others, and have strong, institutionalised student organisations. But of course there are also many other ways to include students in quality assurance. Stensaker & Matear (2025) explore key practices and “critical issues to be considered” and find three main perspectives.

1. In the “legal approach“, student involvement is anchored in the law and it is thus a formal right.
2. In the “public interest approach“, students are seen as customers and their organisations are seen as external pressure groups like also employers and others; involving students is stakeholder involvement.
3. In the “partnership approach“, “student involvement is understood as a relationship based on mutual trust“.

These perspectives can (and do) exist in parallel in various combinations, and student roles are “very dynamic, unpredictable and potentially transformative“. One difficulty that comes up again and again is how to balance accountability on the one hand, and improvement-oriented involvement on the other. Also, who decides which students are involved, are they elected by all students or appointed by some authority?

Stensaker & Matear (2025) describe the example of Sparqs (“Student partnerships in quality Scotland“) as a public charity that supports both students as well as institutions and the whole higher education sector in ways to include students in partnerships in quality assurance. They do trainings and other events and provide tools for students and other stakeholders. For example, they have developed a staircase visualisation from students being information providers who complete surveys at the bottom end, over being actors who are involved in collecting and analysing feedback, experts in how students learn, to being full partners at the top. This tool helps in discussions about what roles students could take in general, and maybe should take in a specific quality assurance process.

I was recommended this paper by a colleague and while it is useful, I also think that the quality assurance perspective is too narrow and obscures that, of course, students could and should be involved also in other aspects of teaching and learning, in a co-creation sense, too!

Stensaker, B., & Matear, S. (2025). Student involvement in quality assurance: Perspectives and practices towards persistent partnerships. Quality in Higher Education, 31(1), 8-22.

Images today from an evening dip with sunset walk home…