QAA welcomes new student committee members, what it means for student engagement in quality assurance

Updated Sep 07, 2026

On 10 February 2026, QAA announced new members of its Student Strategic Advisory Committee (SSAC). The committee brings together students, student representatives and staff from students’ unions or representative bodies to advise QAA. Its work during that academic year included helping set priorities and promote opportunities for student engagement. QAA announcement.

What the announcement says

The named new members included Jessica Sanders of Lincoln Bishop University, alongside members associated with UCL, Edinburgh, Wrexham and Manchester. The announcement relates the committee’s work to the UK Quality Code’s principle of students participating as partners in quality assurance and enhancement.

This was a committee membership announcement. It did not, by itself, introduce a new regulatory requirement, reporting deadline or mandatory survey method for providers. QAA membership announcement.

Questions for local student engagement work

Our practical interpretation is that the update offers a useful prompt to examine how student involvement influences decisions. Choose a recent quality-review decision and ask which students helped shape the question, interpret the evidence and agree the response.

Survey comments are one input. Representative meetings, complaints and direct discussion may reveal different experiences. Keep their collection methods and limitations visible instead of combining them into a single apparently representative count. Record where student participants disagree as well as where they identify a shared priority.

For each agreed action, identify an owner, a review point and a way for students to see progress. Invite a further response so that closing an administrative task does not automatically stand in for resolving the underlying concern.

The student comment analysis governance checklist can help teams document how qualitative evidence is accessed and interpreted. These are our suggested practices, not additional requirements announced by QAA.

Correction, 7 September 2026: corrected Jessica Sanders’s affiliation from Leeds to Lincoln Bishop University and removed an unsupported job title. The source review used the complete indexed text of QAA’s announcement because its live URL returned an error; this limits confirmation of the page’s present availability.