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Cultivating quality in higher education: Policy, practice & purpose in the UK & China

Research Intelligence issue 166

Quality higher education (HE) is widely seen as one of the most important investments we as a society can make for future generations – it is a cornerstone of economic development, social mobility and peace. However, cultivating and maintaining quality is inherently complex. Globally, universities have been facing numerous challenges simultaneously, including substantial increases in student enrolment, reduced public funding, erosion of academic freedom and a gradual commodification of learning. If the quality of HE is defined as the relationship between universities’ purpose to serve society, their processes and practices to generate and transmit knowledge, and stakeholders’ lived experiences, then the compounding effects of recent challenges have diluted and eroded it.

Guest editors, Antonia Voigt and Tianqi Lu, bring together practitioners and researchers from two HE systems to spotlight how individuals and initiatives are working to cultivate quality, despite the unfavourable conditions in which universities currently operate. Contributors discuss quality related to learning, teaching, research, student experience and emerging technologies in British and Chinese contexts.

Contributions to this issue:

• Andrew MacLaren highlights the need for student and staff agency to enhance feedback literacy at UK universities.
• Gerald Dampier, Erivan White, Nick Edwards and Zainab Atta show how they designed a foundation year programme to improve widening participation.
• Mingzheng Hu examines student agency in transnational education through those choosing to pursue non-mobile transnational degrees in China.
• Yang Li reflects on how her UK studies shaped her personal agency and enabled her, as a teacher at a Chinese school, to help students avoid ‘hollowness’.
• Alice Lowe discusses the role of sustainability initiatives at a UK university in creating immersive context for quality student experiences.
• Piero Vitelli explains how off-campus residential training programmes for doctoral students in the UK offered immersive environments to develop lifelong skills.
• Rebecca Maxwell Stuart illustrates the power of structured writing retreats in Scotland to create the necessary immersive environment for academics to generate high-quality research.
• Qianhui Sun describes the benefits and challenges of digital immersion offered through artificial intelligence for Chinese students studying English.
• Tianqi Lu explores how international students reimagined everyday online caring practices, creating immersive pedagogical and pastoral spaces at a UK university.

Elsewhere in this issue:

• We feature the official photos and highlights from the ½¿É«µ¼º½ AGM & Annual Awards Ceremony held in November 2025.
• We announce the which recognises the highest quality and most original and impactful articles published in RI.
• There is an update from the latest event in the ½¿É«µ¼º½ Presidential Seminar Series which focused on anti-racist education in Northern Ireland.
• This issue’s book feature reviews The Pedagogy of Radical Change: Social Movements, Resistance and Alternative Futures in Higher Education and Society by Spyros Themelis. 
• Shone Surendran, from the ECR Network, considers how ECRs can challenge academic binaries and forge alternative pathways that embrace the full spectrum of human thinking in educational theory, research and publishing culture.

Free article:

Education research: The ecosystem & the common good 
By David James 

The chair of the ½¿É«µ¼º½ Expert Panel on Educational Research Funding, David James, writes about his experience of working with the panel and summarises the panel’s final report, Making the most of education research: The ecosystem and the common good. Click below to read this free access article!

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