The Institutional Audit Briefing Visit will take place over three days from Tuesday 4th May to Thursday 6th May 2010.
According to the QAA Handbook for Institutional Audit:
An audit team's visit to an institution will take place in two parts. The first part is the briefing visit, which is an opportunity for the team to gain a sound understanding of the institution and its approach to the strategic management of academic standards and quality of provision prior to the audit visit. During the briefing visit the team will explore and gain further clarification of matters outlined in the briefing papers submitted by the institution and by the students, and will consider some of the evidence offered by documents cited as references in the institution's briefing paper. The briefing visit will also offer the institution and student representatives an opportunity to bring the team up to date on developments and changes since the briefing papers were submitted, and to raise with the team any other matters that they consider would be particularly worthy of exploration by the team during the audit visit.
In advance of this visit each Auditor will be asked to consider the Institutional Briefing Paper but to concentrate on a number of key areas from a standard set of headings. They will each be asked to produce a commentary against these headings to cover emerging themes, areas of doubt, areas for clarification, questions etc. The Audit Secretary will then collate these documents into one and the first private meeting held between the Auditors during the Briefing Visit will be used to discuss this. The schedule for the Briefing Visit can be found here.