Monitoring and Evaluation

Quality and Enhancement Manual

At Bloomsbury Institute we are committed to providing our students with a high-quality educational experience. We have therefore put in place a comprehensive series of internal mechanisms to monitor and evaluate the quality of our provision at both course and module level to ensure the student experience is continuously enhanced. These mechanisms comprise a number of key activities including completion of evaluations and questionnaires by students and reports by our academic teams.

Key to our monitoring and evaluation procedures is the student voice which is captured at an individual level through our student evaluations and questionnaires, and at a group or collective level through student representation on our key committees: Course Committees; the Quality Assurance and Enhancement Committee; and the Academic Committee. Students also input through their representation on our Student Staff Consultative Forum. These channels of communication are a crucial component of the deliberative aspect of our quality system.

Our approach to monitoring and evaluation is informed by one of our corporate purposes, namely to establish a self-critical, cohesive academic community that has a commitment to quality assurance supported by effective quality and enhancement systems. How we achieve this is set out in our Annual Monitoring and Evaluation Procedures and our Annual Planning Cycle. Both documents are closely linked as our Annual Planning Cycle sets out the arrangements for strategic planning and budget setting based on our quality monitoring mechanisms. Both documents also set out responsibilities in terms of oversight and approval of the various monitoring reports that are produced.

Like all higher education providers in the UK, the QAA Quality Code states we must meet certain Expectations for Monitoring and Evaluation. These are:

QAA Quality Code Expectations

For Standards:

• The academic standards of courses meet the requirements of the relevant national qualifications framework
  • Monitoring and evaluation ensures that providers’ academic provision enables students to achieve the intended learning outcomes of courses. They evaluate student attainment of academic standards and allow providers to confirm that their portfolio aligns with their mission and strategic priorities.

• The value of qualifications awarded to students at the point of qualification and over time is in line with sector-recognised standards
  • Monitoring and evaluation is an essential process within a provider’s internal quality mechanisms, covering all provision that leads to their awards and assuring the standard of those qualifications. Relevant sector-recognised standards form a baseline for monitoring and evaluation systems.

For Quality:

• Courses are well-designed, provide a high-quality academic experience for all students and enable a student’s achievement to be reliably assessed
  • Effective monitoring and evaluation allows providers to consider objectively whether their courses are in fact well-designed and high-quality, and can consider whether other systems and processes are effective in ensuring reliable assessment.

• From admission through to completion, all students are provided with the support that they need to succeed in and benefit from higher education
  • Monitoring and evaluation systems look at all stages of the student experience and consider the support provided to students.

What’s next?

Within the Expectations above, the QAA Quality Code also sets out Core Practices that we need to meet – see below. Go to How we do things to see our approaches in meeting these Core Practices.