The quality of teaching in higher education has never been more important. This has created an opportunity to raise the profile of teaching, promote, and develop our diverse sector’s reputation for teaching excellence.
The Higher Education Academy can support you by working in partnership to promote teaching excellence in your institution and deliver effective change that in turn positively impacts on core metrics and key performance indicators. Our consultancy support helps you address key priorities at institutional, faculty, departmental, service or programme level and extends across all aspects of learning and teaching including:
- Embedding employability into your curriculum and the broader student experience
- Transforming assessment policy and practice to enhance student learning
- Maximising student retention and targeting positive outcomes for all students
- Supporting you to deliver, review and design effective curricula to enhance student success
- Encouraging and rewarding excellent teaching through staff development & cultural change
- Leading and managing change in your institution, ensuring strategic priorities are embedded.
Tailoring your priorities across specific disciplines
Whether you're working with us across a range of disciplines or within a specific disciplinary area (Arts and Humanities, Health and Social Care, Social Sciences, STEM), we will shape our services to meet your needs.
Working together to address your priorities
Delivering effective change
The Higher Education Academy will work with you to deliver practical solutions to address your priorities. Whether you're looking to realise opportunities at a broad institutional or faculty level, or to enhance teaching in specific departments or programmes, we will work with you to identify the appropriate approach - whether that is focused intervention or a blended approach. The HEA use a four-step process to support you in achieving your goals with a number of tools and techniques within these steps to suit your particular situation.
Conceptualising
Engage with our diagnostic tools and services, delivered onsite and online, helping you to analyse and benchmark your current performance.
Planning and preparation
We will work collaboratively with you, engaging stakeholders along the way to make sure the best model for change is developed for your situation.
Implementation, delivery and monitoring
We will assist you in embedding your priorities through interventions designed to strengthen the skills and knowledge of your staff.
Completion and closure
We can help you determine the impact of your change process and provide recommendations for your next steps.
Our Consultancy Team has worked with a range of higher education institutions, including:
Supporting student success
Best practice frameworks developed with the sector for the sector
The issues affecting student success can be broad and complex, however having a shared point of reference and common language to discuss, shape and review policy, process and practice can be an extremely effective way of applying a consistent methodology to leading change. This is equally applicable at institutional level as it is at faculty, departmental, programme or individual levels. Our frameWORKS series covers the key thematic priorities that impact upon the quality of learning and teaching in higher education.
“The Higher Education Academy frameworks are evidence-based and provide the higher education sector with a national reference point to enable the institution to develop its own approach according to local circumstances as well as benchmarking performance.” Universities UK (2016), p.73, Working in partnership: enabling social mobility.
The HEA will work with you to deliver practical solutions to address other priorities. Whether you're looking to realise opportunities at a broad institution or faculty level, or to enhance teaching in specific departments or programmes, select either a focused intervention or a blended approach across the three stages (diagnostic, delivery, impact). Find out about our broader work supporting student success.
Enhancing HE Through Strategic Change and Innovation
End to end support to tackle your major institutional challenges
This is a bespoke programme designed to support a full change process built around school, faculty or institutional teaching and learning priorities. This programme uses a collaborative four-step process: conceptualising; planning and preparation; implementation, delivery and monitoring, and; completion and closure. The programme can address a number of themes linked to student success including:
- student retention and attainment;
- assessment and feedback;
- employability;
- internationalisation;
- student engagement;
- flexible learning.
Our work
“The support from the HEA has been crucial to the success of the project. Meetings provided a clear framework for our activities and prompted steps that we may otherwise have missed. Discussions with our HEA consultant have been invaluable for encouraging reflection at key stages and have ensured momentum.”
Dr Christine Rogers, Reader in Psychology and Faculty Lead for Employability, Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences, University of Manchester
“The main benefit was the rigour to the training session that the HEA consultant provided. This made participants feel more confident. The HEA consultant was excellent - she facilitated the session extremely well, dealing with queries and questions effectively and utilising her extensive knowledge of the process”
Dr Kerry Dobbins, Professional Development Adviser, University of Leicester
"The HEA are really good partners. They understand Bahrain, they understand the Middle East, and our issues. They do not provide something off the shelf...their people have great energy, great experiences and are a pleasure to work with."
Cameron Mirza, Head of Projects, Higher Education Council, Kingdom of Bahrain