The sector is working to take forward the Graduates for the 21st Century Enhancement Theme (G21C). This is being conducted through recently constituted G21C institutional teams, which include members from a variety of areas including student support staff, students and academic staff. All teams have designed and are presently implementing institutional plans to progress the Enhancement Theme over the next academic year.

Each higher education institution (HEI) has approached the Enhancement Theme according to its particular institutional learning and teaching priorities. While activities are broad ranging, there are a number of similar approaches and activities. Nearly all HEIs are running internal and cross-institutional conferences or events over the next year. For example, the University of Dundee is hosting a Quality Enhancement Conference on 9 December 2009. The focus of the event will be 'assessment and feedback' and the day will include contributions, aimed at both staff and students, from G21C project facilitators Professor David Nicol (University of Strathclyde, facilitator for the Assessment Enhancement Theme) and Dr Vicky Gunn (University of Glasgow, facilitator for the Employability and Research-Teaching Linkages Enhancement Themes).

Other activities include supporting small project funding to focus on particular aspects of completed Enhancement Themes to aid development and implementation of innovative practice, for example at University of Stirling and Queen Margaret University. Some institutions are developing online resources and tools (such as a G21C wiki at the University of Edinburgh and an online Virtual Learning Environment support system at Edinburgh College of Art), to support embedding and consolidation of the Enhancement Themes.

Project facilitators for completed Enhancement Themes are in place to support institutional priorities and facilitate institutional and inter-institutional work. These facilitators will organise Enhancement Theme events and activities of relevance to the sector. They will also contribute to the website to build an up-to-date resource for the sector. Further details of facilitators can be found on the Enhancement Themes website.

The overarching considerations of the Enhancement Theme’s work are what we mean by the ‘attributes of the 21st century graduate’ and how the achievement of these attributes can best be supported. G21C discussions and activities will continue throughout the current and next academic year and will contribute to sectoral symposium events to be organised for later in 2010.

SHEEC held its first meeting of the 2009-10 session at the end of October at Glasgow Caledonian University with its new Chair, Professor Andrea Nolan, Senior Vice-Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Glasgow. Among the items discussed was the programme of work for the coming year. This will include work to refresh the five-year rolling programme of Enhancement Themes, international scoping into how institutions develop and enhance their quality cultures, and revisiting the strategies for Enhancement Themes and International Benchmarking projects, as well as the management of G21C and the Enhancement Theme conference. In addition, the overall Quality Enhancement Framework (including the Enhancement Themes) is subject to an ongoing independent evaluation commissioned by the Scottish Funding Council and being taken forward by a team from Lancaster University. SHEEC will seek to incorporate any emerging outcomes from that evaluation into its strategies and work.

QAA officers were invited to present a workshop on the Enhancement Themes at the recent European Universities Association, Fourth European Quality Assurance Forum in Copenhagen. Delegates at the conference numbered over 400 with representatives from over 30 countries mainly from within Europe but from as far afield as Hong Kong, Australia, Iceland and South Africa.

The theme of this year’s Forum was “Creativity and Diversity: Challenges for quality assurance beyond 2010”. The main goal of the event was to provide a discussion forum centred on how current internal and external quality assurance approaches take account of institutional diversity and support creativity and innovative practices in higher education. It was suggested that in many countries where the quality assurance systems are bound more by a compliance model that the cost for increasing consistency across higher education is limiting creativity and recognition of the diversity across the broad range of higher education institutions.

The general ethos of the Scottish Quality Enhancement Framework and the Themes in particular sat readily within the Theme, particularly the Graduates for the 21st century Theme where institutions are taking the lead through institutional teams to take forward the Theme according to their own institutional priorities. The result was great interest and discussion around our work and hopefully contacts made for future activity.

Full details and papers from the conference.

On 2 November 2009, The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow, hosted a stimulating Research-Teaching Linkages Enhancement Theme event for Creative and Cultural Practice (CCP) disciplines.

Led by Dr Ken Neil of The Glasgow School of Art, nine case studies were presented across three parallel workshop sessions, to around 50 attendees from 14 HEIs. Colleagues' expertise spanned subject areas within film and TV, cultural studies, product design, fashion, dance, drama and performance, music and fine art.

The morning was introduced by Professor Allan Walker, The Glasgow School of Art, followed by an afternoon presentation by Professor Andrea Nolan, University of Glasgow, Chair of the Research-Teaching Linkages Enhancement Theme. Professor Nolan emphasised that the Enhancement Theme had constructively taken an inclusive approach to definitions of research, encompassing, amongst other categories, ‘practice-based and applied research including performances, creative works and industrial or professional secondments’.

Later in the day, Professor Alan Jenkins, Oxford Brookes University, author of the Research-Teaching Linkages overview report, talked to attendees about the salient points which had emerged from the workshops. Professor Jenkins said that CCP disciplines are well placed to embed research-type attributes within a studio and practice-based curriculum by virtue of the common element of reflexive learning on the part of CCP students. The variety of research undertaken in CCP, in line with Professor Nolan’s spectrum, informs the curriculum in a rich way. However, students might be made more aware of the particularity of the research skills which they are tutored, encouraged and expected to employ within CCP degree programmes, and to that end staff might endeavour to make more explicit that aspect of studies, from as early a stage as possible.

The event closed with a panel discussion chaired by Professor Ian Pirie, Edinburgh College of Art. Questions collated from group discussions throughout the day were addressed and comment from the floor was heard. Many of Professor Jenkins’s observations were supported in this session, in particular the issue of how the subject domains comprising CCP might work a little harder to explain to other disciplines in higher education the good (and transferable) practice which resides in CCP areas in respect of integrating research skills and content into a practice-based learning environment.

A compendium of practice to include notes and reflections on the day’s events, questions and discussions will be available on the Enhancement Themes website in December.

The conference will take place at the Edinburgh Conference Centre, Heriot-Watt University, and will focus on the current Enhancement Theme, Graduates for the 21st Century: Integrating the Enhancement Themes.

Professor Andrea Nolan, Senior Vice-Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow and Chair of SHEEC will chair the conference. As the Enhancement Theme’s Steering Committee Chair, Professor Philip Winn, University of St Andrews, will present a plenary session on Graduates for the 21st Century. Invited speakers will address different aspects of the student journey in relation to supporting the development of graduate attributes.

The speakers include the following: Cathy Macaslan, Scottish Government Policy Adviser to the Scottish Government and Vice Principal, University of Aberdeen will consider what will be the experience of many prospective students in the near future, by addressing the Curriculum for Excellence for school education and its implications for higher education and the development of graduate attributes. Professor George D Kuh, Chancellor's Professor and Director, Center for Postsecondary Research, Indiana University, USA has conducted extensive research on the American student experience surveys and will speak about what really works in terms of supporting student achievement in higher education. On the second day of the conference, the focus will be on where students go after undergraduate studies. Sir Andrew Cubie will speak from the employer perspective of graduate attributes and Professor Ian Diamond, Chief Executive, ESRC will speak from the research perspective.

As well as plenary sessions, there will be workshop and poster sessions. The majority will come from a call to colleagues to submit proposals. The closing date for submissions is 8 December, so there is still a little time to send in an application form, which is available on the Enhancement Themes website.

In addition to posters submitted through the call for proposals, we will be displaying posters from the Australian Graduate Attributes Project (GAP), led by Simon Barrie of the University of Sydney. Simon has contributed to the Research-Teaching Linkages Enhancement Theme and has been a plenary speaker at the annual conference. These posters were displayed at a number of GAP events across Australia during the summer and will include some from Scottish HEIs as a result of an invitation from Simon.

The full conference programme will be available in January on the Enhancement Themes website and those on this mailing list will be informed when conference booking opens.

We hope to welcome many of you to Edinburgh in March 2010.

Professor George Kuh	Professor Andrea Nolan	Professor Philip Winn	Sir Andrew Cubie	Cathy Macaslan

As reported in our September newsletter, the second phase of the International Benchmarking: Supporting Student Success project involved a study tour to Denmark and Sweden and some in-depth investigation of practice in several key areas. Some of the messages emerging from the final reports are:

• the support of students in Scottish higher education compares favourably with practice investigated in the rest of the world, but we cannot afford to be complacent
• investigating international practice has been very useful in terms of discovering innovative ways of working with students
• effective student support happens when support services are brought together (including student association input) and managed holistically and, as importantly, it is recognised that student support services provide as valuable a contribution to the student experience in higher education as teaching and learning
• students like to help and be helped by other students
• support staff in different professions do not routinely network outwith their professional areas and that opportunities to do so are welcomed.

The reports are nearing completion and will be published on the Enhancement Themes website very soon. SHEEC has approved a programme to take forward the outcomes from the project to encourage the sector to take these up and work with them. This will involve meeting with student support organisations and groups and the organisation of a sector-wide conference in the second half of April 2010. More details will be circulated soon. In the meantime, we are seeking additional case studies to add those already provided: Scottish Institutional Case Studies.

The working group for International Benchmarking of the Postgraduate Research Degree Student Experience will meet for the first time in December, chaired by Professor Dominic Houlihan, Vice-Principal in Research, University of Aberdeen. The committee of 11 institutional and postgraduate student members will be joined by observers from the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), Higher Education Academy (HEA), Vitae and Universities Scotland.

During September, a scoping workshop took place, organised jointly with SFC, QAA Scotland and Vitae. Chaired by Professor Alan Miller, Vice-Principal Research, Heriot-Watt University, 61 delegates from a number of institutions and organisations attended plenary and breakout sessions.

A joint programme of work will be established between SFC, Vitae and QAA Scotland, a key feature of which will be further workshops to be hosted by each of these organisations respectively. Colleagues from HEA will also be invited to participate in this programme of work, with a view to sharing practice on the Postgraduate Experience Surveys and The Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey

For further information or copies of any documents, please email Dr Frances Morton.

Dr Frances Morton

Frances Morton joined QAA Scotland in January 2009 as a Development Officer in the Development and Enhancement Group Scotland. Her main areas of work are SHEEC international benchmarking of postgraduate research degrees, and recognition of prior learning - which involves coordinating a Scotland-wide network of practitioners.

Frances previously worked as Acting Head of Scottish Music and as a Researcher at the RSAMD Glasgow, after completing her doctorate at the University of Bristol in 2005. In her spare time, Frances plays traditional music - performing regularly with fellow musicians at concerts and festivals - and enjoys keeping fit, especially yoga.

One of the remaining reports from the Research-Teaching Linkages Theme has just been published. Research-Teaching Linkages in the Information and Mathematical Sciences (IMS) is currently being distributed to all HEIs in Scotland and is also available for download from the Enhancement Themes website or to order from qaa@linneydirect.com.

Research-Teaching Linkages in the Information and Mathematical Sciences This comprehensive report examines the experiences of academic staff and students within the IMS subject areas. A large number of case studies and snapshots of current practice demonstrate how the student experience and graduate attributes can be enhanced by activities that link research and teaching. Download your copy from the Enhancement Themes website.

As part of the continuing development of the Enhancement Theme Newsletter we would like to invite contributions from the higher education sector for inclusion in future editions. The focus of articles should be how HEIs have used or built on one or more of the previous Enhancement Themes to enhance the student learning experience. We would welcome articles from students, practitioners, senior managers, support staff (or any combination of these) amongst others.

Articles should be no longer that 500 words and be submitted by 8 February 2010 for the March edition and by 10 May 2010 for the June edition. Articles should be submitted to enhancement@qaa.ac.uk. We cannot guarantee to include submitted articles but QAA officers would be very happy to discuss proposals and can be contacted at enhancement@qaa.ac.uk.

If you would like to be kept informed of funding opportunities as they arise, please join our register of consultants by visiting Opportunities section of the Enhancement Themes website.