STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLE CONCERNING THE UNIVERSITY'S RELATIONSHIPS WITH PROFESSIONAL AND STATUTORY BODIES
The University acknowledges the importance of the relationships which it enjoys with a wide range of Professional and Statutory Bodies and the cordiality of those relationships, which is dependent upon goodwill, trust and mutual respect.
Ideally, accreditation processes should be constructive and collaborative, rather than regulatory and controlling.
Professional and Statutory Bodies should be concerned with outputs (professional competence) not inputs. Their main purpose is to test ‘fitness for practice’.
Academic standards and quality assurance of professional accredited programmes are the province of the University and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education.
Parity of workloads between students on accredited and non-accredited programmes must be maintained.
If progression or the academic requirements of an accredited programme differ from University norms, this must be made clear in the prospectus, student handbooks and programme specification.
Whilst the University, through its officers, will be pleased to have a dialogue with accreditation panels concerning resource envelopes in respect of departments seeking accreditation or re-accreditation, the University has an overall duty to ensure fairness in distributing resources across all sectors of the institution.
