by Jens Jungblut & Bjørn Stensaker
Throughout Europe, students are often regular members of external quality assurance mandated to perform evaluations and accreditations in higher education. While this role has been secured through the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG), we have little knowledge about how students participate in such panels and which roles they take up. In a paper presented at the SRHE conference in Nottingham in December 2025, we addressed this issue – both conceptually and empirically.
One could imagine that there are several roles that students could play as part in an external quality assurance panel. Students are most often seen as representatives of their fellow students. This has implications as to how students are appointed to such panels, as various student interest organizations usually have the power to nominate specific students to the task. More recently, the idea of students being partners has also gained interest, where a key assumption is that students should be involved and participate in all aspect and processes related to their own education – including quality assurance. The initiative “student partnerships in quality Scotland (sparqs)” is a well-known example of this inclusive approach (Varwell, 2021). However, one could argue that students may even take on an expertise-based role in quality assurance. This type of role is not based on experience per se but rather the ability to reflect upon the knowledge possessed and the ability to engage in systematic efforts to learn more – based on these reflections (Ericsson, 2017).
In our paper presented at the SRHE conference we argue that the role of students participating in quality assurance panels (or any other related processes in higher education) may not be static, restricting students to merely one role at a time (see also Stensaker & Matear, 2024). We rather argue – in line with Holen et al (2021) – that the roles students may take on are highly dynamic. A consequence of this would be that students may shift rapidly from one role to another, depending on, for example, the evaluation context, committee setting, or the issue that is being discussed.
To test our assumptions, we conducted a survey targeting students taking part in European quality assurance processes; to be more specific, we targeted the `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` within the European Students’ Union. This group was established in 2009 with the aim to improve the contribution of students in quality assurance in Europe. When included in the pool, students undergo training sessions providing them with relevant background knowledge about quality assurance processes and the ESG. The members of the pool are then called upon by quality assurance agencies throughout Europe to act as student representatives on their quality assurance panels at program, institutional, or national level, performing evaluations, accreditations and other forms of assessments. The `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` therefore represents a unique entity in Europe, as it is the only European structure that collects and trains students for these roles. 35 students (of a total of 90) responded to our survey.
The students responding have on average been involved in quality assurance for more than four years, and over 60 percent have participated in four or more evaluation or accreditation processes. In line with our expectations, the students indeed report that they are taking on several roles during the evaluation processes, they are representatives of students, they feel they are equal partners within the evaluation panel they are part of, and they also see themselves as experts. In our data, we could not identify a clear hierarchy between the different roles. However, our data suggest that students are often perceived as a partner, while less often as experts. A possible interpretation here is that temporality and experience matter: students may be initially viewed as a representative and as a partner when starting their work within the panel, and through the process of participating in multiple panels over time they might demonstrate expertise which is in turn recognized by their peers in the panels. An interesting feature coming out of the data is also that the students in the `Quality Assurance Student Experts Pool` regularly share knowledge among the members of the pool, and in that way contribute to continuously build the expertise of all members. Expertise is in this way not taken for granted or expected as a prerequisite for being a member, but rather nurtured, systematised and made available to newer and future members.
We want to thank all the students that bothered to respond to our small questionnaire. While our study is exploratory, we do think it provides new insights regarding student involvement and influence in a setting characterized by a high level of expertise and professionalism, and we hope that the findings can help future research to further unpack the dynamic nature of students’ roles in quality assurance panels.
Jens Jungblut is a Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. His main research interests include party politics, policy-making, and public governance in the knowledge policy domain (education & research), organizational change in higher education, agenda-setting research, and the role of (academic) expertise in policy advice.
Bjørn Stensaker is a Professor at the Department of Education at the University of Oslo. He has a special research interest in governance, leadership, and organizational change in higher education – including quality assurance. He has published widely on these topics in a range of journals and book series.
