The Power of Self-Evaluation

Photo: Edinburgh Napier University

At his trial, Socrates famously said that the unexamined life is not worth living. That was almost 1,500 years ago and what he said is still true; not only for our personal lives but also for how we collaborate with others professionally to improve the impact of our work. 

Self-evaluation – honest, self-critical thinking – is at the heart of tertiary education’s new approach to quality assurance and enhancement, and has long been part of Scotland’s way of doing things. 

Self-evaluation and action plans (SEAPs for short) are the vehicle for making this a catalyst for continuous improvement. They are an integral part of Scotland’s Tertiary Quality Enhancement Framework, the shared vision for a tertiary education system that consistently provides the best learning experience for students. 

We received our first SEAPs from colleges and universities at the end of last year. The work we’ve been doing on them over the last few months has confirmed institutions’ willingness to incorporate the key principals of the framework into their self-evaluation. 

I’m pleased to be able to say too that there are some really encouraging examples of good practice right across Scotland’s tertiary education sector. Amongst these, it’s especially good to see student support being a point of focus; the SEAPs tell us that colleges and universities across Scotland are working incredibly hard to support their students effectively.  

It was interesting, and not unexpected, to see some variation between the self-evaluation and action plans submitted to us by colleges and universities; possibly a legacy of the different approaches to these activities in the previous sector-specific frameworks.  

Perhaps, also to be expected was the fact the presentation and analysis of data varied considerably between submissions. We are taking on board early feedback from the sector, suggesting that we need to introduce some level of standardisation in the data, while retaining a degree of flexibility to enable institutions to reflect their unique context. 

This variation was probably most readily apparent to us in the word count. This was one area which was hotly debated in the run up to publishing the guidance; we finally settled on 5,000 words. Most colleges and universities  submitted between 4,500 and 7,000 words. However, there were signs that some institutions genuinely struggled to frame their self-evaluation within the original limit, so this is another area we will reflect on. 

We were looking for evidence of clear lines of sight between self-evaluation and action planning. I’m really pleased to say that in this important area, the majority of the returns achieve this link incredibly well. However, it would also be fair to say that the impact of the actions in many cases could be improved by being more specific and having clearer timelines. The value of this is that the future evaluation of progress would be far easier to accomplish and communicate. 

Thinking about the SEAP programme so far, it feels like good progress has been made. Quality enhancement within Scottish tertiary education is an endeavour best undertaken in a spirit of openness, willingness to share, and constructive reflection. The SEAPs continue to move us towards that and add that further and crucial dimension of what to do next as we all continue together to enhance the student experience. 

Colleges and universities have been invited to provide us with their feedback of using the SEAP guidance to prepare their first submissions. We will shortly be following this up with focus groups to explore the process in more detail, and in the summer we will publish a report that explores the content of the reports in more depth. 

Meanwhile, I’d like to close by saying thank you to everyone who has contributed to the production of this first round of self-evaluation and action plans. It’s not easy to be a pioneer but the benefits will be felt by us all – and most importantly by students – well into the future.  

Karen Gray, Assistant Director: Learning and Quality, Scottish Funding Council