Student representation in quality assurance needs training, trust, and usable evidence
Updated Jul 16, 2026
Inviting students into quality assurance is the easy part. The harder part is making sure they have enough context, confidence, and evidence to do more than occupy a seat in the room. That is why Hiroko Take and Åsa Kettis's Quality in Higher Education paper, "Students’ assessment literacy in quality assurance of higher education institutions in Sweden: the perspectives of students, teachers and administrators", matters for universities trying to turn student voice into a credible part of quality work rather than a symbolic extra.
Context and research question
Across higher education, student participation in quality assurance usually spans two routes. One is broad but indirect, through tools such as course evaluations. The other is narrower but more formal, through elected representatives on programme boards, review panels, and governance bodies. Both routes are familiar in UK higher education, but institutions still face the same practical question: what do students need in order to contribute meaningfully once they are invited in?
Take and Kettis address that problem through a qualitative study at three large Swedish research universities: the University of Gothenburg, Stockholm University, and Uppsala University. Between February and July 2024, they ran semi-structured group interviews with 20 student representatives, 10 teachers, and 8 administrators involved in internal quality assurance. Sweden is a useful setting because student participation is formalised in law and embedded in university practice, which lets the paper focus less on whether student involvement should exist and more on what makes it work in practice.
The core concept in the paper is student assessment literacy, meaning the knowledge and skills students need to participate effectively in quality assurance. That matters for UK Student Experience teams because representative structures often depend on assumptions. Institutions assume students will know how to read papers, interpret evaluation evidence, represent peers, and challenge staff constructively, when those capacities usually need active support.
Key findings
The paper argues that meaningful student participation depends on a learnable form of quality-assurance literacy, not just goodwill. Students, teachers, and administrators broadly agreed that effective representatives need to understand the institutional context, prepare for meetings, form and express views, and represent more than their own personal experience. In other words, participation works best when students can connect individual concerns to wider educational systems.
That literacy develops through participation rather than existing in advance. The study found that students build capability by attending meetings, reading papers, taking part in evaluations, and receiving support from student unions and university staff. Training, handbooks, pre-meetings, and informal briefings all help. The paper's underlying message is important for UK teams: if universities wait for fully formed representatives to appear, they will mistake a support problem for a recruitment problem.
The authors make the point directly:
"effective student engagement in internal quality assurance depends on developing assessment literacy"
Course evaluations remain important, but weak participation can hollow out the wider evidence base. The interviews describe course evaluations as a key route for hearing from the broader student body, not only the students confident enough to become representatives. At all three universities, however, low response rates were seen as a growing problem. That finding transfers well to UK practice. Representative systems are stronger when they are backed by wider survey and comment evidence, not when a few students are expected to speak for everyone from memory alone.
The paper also shows that quality assurance is relational work, not just procedural work. Students in the study described meetings as potentially intimidating, especially when they were the only student in the room or were dealing with senior academic staff. Teachers, meanwhile, worried at times that students might push personal agendas rather than broader cohort concerns. Administrators added a useful nuance: tensions do not sit only between staff and students, because consensus among staff can be difficult as well. The practical implication is that effective participation depends on atmosphere, invitation, and trust as much as on committee structure.
A cooperative stance matters, but cooperation is not the same as compliance. One of the paper's strongest contributions is showing that student representatives need to balance partnership with critique. Students are expected to work constructively with staff, but still raise concerns clearly when needed. That balance is easy to state and harder to design for, especially if institutions celebrate partnership rhetorically while making it risky for students to disagree.
Practical implications
For UK universities, the first implication is to treat student representative capability as something to build, not something to assume. If reps are expected to interpret papers, contribute to review meetings, and connect local issues to wider educational quality, they need briefings, mentoring, clear agendas, and explicit permission to speak. Recent work on student members in quality assurance panels needing status, training, and evidence points in the same direction. The benefit is more confident, less tokenistic participation.
Second, institutions should connect representative structures to broader student evidence more deliberately. A course rep can surface an issue early, but they should not be the only source for deciding whether that issue is widespread. This is where QAA's recent research on student representation practices and student feedback systems is especially relevant: mixed systems of surveys, reps, and qualitative feedback work better when they are designed as one evidence picture. For quality teams, the gain is a more defensible basis for prioritising action.
Third, universities should take low course-evaluation response rates seriously as a governance issue, not only a survey issue. This paper shows why. If broad student input weakens, representative bodies lose part of the evidence they need, and the whole quality process becomes more dependent on whichever voices happen to be present. The study also notes that response rates can improve when teachers use evaluation results and communicate the resulting changes back to students. Institutions can partly reduce the risk by making that follow-through visible, simplifying survey design, and using structured analysis of open comments to test whether representative concerns match wider patterns. The benefit is stronger coverage of the student experience, especially beyond the most engaged participants.
Finally, teams should design for inclusion inside the quality process itself. The paper highlights language barriers for some international students, hidden hierarchy in meetings, and the pressure of being the only student in the room. Those are not minor frictions. They shape which students participate, how far they speak, and whether the system hears a broad enough range of experience. A practical student comment analysis governance checklist helps here because it forces teams to define evidence sources, ownership, and escalation routes before student input fragments across committees and surveys. The benefit is a more usable and more equitable quality-assurance system.
FAQ
Q: How should a UK university prepare student representatives for quality assurance roles?
A: Start with a light but deliberate support model: clear role descriptions, short pre-meetings, key documents in plain language, peer mentoring from experienced reps, and an agreed route for escalating issues between meetings. Students do not need to become mini-administrators, but they do need enough context to interpret papers, represent peers, and speak with confidence.
Q: What should institutions do if course evaluation response rates are low?
A: Treat that as an evidence-quality problem, not just a communications problem. If only a small minority respond, representative structures become easier to over-read. Universities should simplify the route, show visibly what changed after previous feedback, and compare committee issues with wider open-text comments wherever possible. That is how teams avoid basing quality decisions on the most available voices rather than the broadest picture.
Q: What does this paper change about student voice more broadly?
A: It reinforces that student voice is not only about creating channels. It is about building the conditions in which students can contribute evidence that is informed, representative, and usable in decisions. The strongest systems do not separate surveys, comments, course reps, and quality processes into parallel tracks. They connect them, so student input can move from expression to interpretation to action.
References
[Paper Source]: Hiroko Take, Åsa Kettis "Students’ assessment literacy in quality assurance of higher education institutions in Sweden: the perspectives of students, teachers and administrators" DOI: 10.1080/13538322.2026.2681275
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