The UK Quality Code for Higher Education is sector-led and sector-owned, endorsed by colleges, universities, and professional and sector bodies across all four nations of the UK.
It provides a framework for how we understand and deliver quality education, establishing principles and expectations to inform academic standards, requirements for regulatory assurance, and quality enhancement activities.
In Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, the Code is mandatory: the formal basis for ensuring academic standards, regulatory assurance, and quality enhancement. In England it is not a regulatory requirement, but provides a quality standard reference point complementing the Conditions of Registration required by the Office for Students whilst helping providers ensure parity in academic standards within the UK and acting as a guide to inform internal enhancement activities.
Despite these differences, current debates on the sustainability and value of HE and the positioning of UK HE on the global stage clearly demonstrate the need for collaborative approaches to ensuring high-quality provision across the four nations and enabling a culture of continuous improvement within providers – whether a regulatory requirement or not.
QAA has today published nine collections of Advice & Guidance supporting the application of the 2024 edition of the Quality Code, following last year’s publication of the first three collections. Each set of Advice & Guidance supports the sector in the application of each of the 12 principles which comprise the Quality Code. These collections are tools for everyone who is at the coalface of delivering quality education in the UK.
One shared code
The UK Quality Code has long been an established anchor in the UK higher education sector landscape, iteratively shaped by changing government approaches to higher education and the wider socioeconomic contexts and markets for higher education. The latest edition, published in 2024, and co-developed with the sector to bring up to date the 2018 iteration commissioned by the Quality Council, has benefited from an extensive consideration of evolving contexts, challenges and approaches – establishing a comprehensive and robust articulation of the convergence of the UK sector’s shared principles and effective practices. This most recent version is helpfully mapped against both the Office for Students’ conditions of registration and the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area – thus serving the needs of all four nations.
What we have now is a reference point informing practice and establishing standards across the sector and guiding the delivery of education at every level in institutions – from Module Organisers questioning how to interact with advice from external examiners to Pro-Vice Chancellors gaining assurance that their institution is reaching and maintaining quality and standards effectively.
The significant impact and efficacy of the Quality Code across the sector owes much to the ownership and authorship by the sector itself, and the rich diversity of expertise and perspectives encompassed by that sector, created by, and applicable to, providers of all sizes and types across all four nations of the UK. Across the UK and though extensive consultation by the QAA practitioners and leaders have contributed to the excellence of these publications.
Under pressure
The completion of the work on this edition of the Quality Code is a landmark moment for the assurance of standards and the continuing enhancement of quality in UK higher education – and is especially timely in today’s environment.
The complete collection of advice and guidance is designed to be future-proofed and to anticipate and address ongoing sectoral, regulatory and policy concerns in the field of quality and standards. It provides advice on subjects such as how to use data to inform quality and programme design, to resourcing and externality, from recruitment practices to operating complaints systems, this suite of guidance is as broad as it is rich; supporting providers in addressing concerns around franchising and partnerships, around the integrity of external examiner systems, and approaches to resourcing – as institutions work to protect quality as their unit of resource declines.
These documents offer welcome support at a time when the sector is experiencing unprecedented challenges and changes – a time of extraordinary financial pressures, technological disruptions, and professional, socioeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties. It comes at a point at which various politicians and media outlets have questioned the value to students and graduates, the national contribution, the academic integrity, the autonomy, and even the need for the existence of higher education institutions.
The Quality Code is not a campaigning or lobbying document. It’s not a manifesto or a pledge. It is a measured and assured articulation of the principles and processes through which we continue to secure standards and to deliver high-quality provision. The Advice and Guidance gives providers tangible recommendations for effective practice in the application of those principles.
As such, it both assures and ensures that providers aligned to its principles and practices are able to deliver the best possible experiences and outcomes, working with students, employers and stakeholders – and colleagues across our sector – to achieve this.
It articulates a superstructure of shared sectoral principles of, and responsibilities for, quality and standards within a structure of institutional autonomies. In doing so, it can be deployed to underpin both public confidence in, and the global reputation of, the quality of UK higher education.
The rest of the world looks to the UK for guidance on quality and key to this reputation is our excellent Quality Code. Over the past few years, for example, QAA has been working closely with the National Quality Assurance Agency for Education in Uzbekistan on a project supported by the British Council to develop Uzbekistan’s own Quality Code. Similarly, QAA has been working with the Higher Education Commission and the Quality Assurance Authority in Mauritius to support the development of new Institutional Accreditation Process Guidelines and of a Quality Code for its higher education sector.
The Quality Code underpins an approach to quality assurance and enhancement which not only continues to inform effective practice across the UK, but which continues to influence the development of similar quality mechanisms across the world.
