Using quality enhancement processes to achieve sustainable development and support for sessional staff

Abstract

Consistent with quality enhancement, we report on how we used a continuous improvement cycle to formalise and embed an academic development and support programme for our School’s sessional staff. Key factors in establishing and maintaining the programme included: local change agents supported initially by institutional project funding; School support for key academic and administrative roles; timely access to reports and tools from nationally-funded projects and sessional staff input. Reviewing our approach against national standards highlighted ongoing actions while collaboration with academic developers is critical for advancing our understanding and reviewing our approaches in our continuously changing context.

Keywords:

• Clinical supervision
• embedding good practice
• integration of sessional staff
• school/department level support
• teacher preparation

Acknowledgements

Sessional staff and students are acknowledged for their feedback. The valuable comments of two anonymous reviewers are gratefully acknowledged.