As the Programme Excellence Project continues, find out about recent progress and hear from colleagues involved in reviewing the curriculum.
About PEP
The Programme Excellence Project (PEP) is a comprehensive review of our undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes. Professor Kathryn Woods , Pro-Vice-Provost (Education - Student Academic Engagement), is leading the project with a team in the Office of the Vice-Provost (Education & Student Experience), alongside colleagues responsible for education and student experience across UCL.
From October 2023 to February 2025 the phase one Portfolio Review looked at our portfolio of programmes, routes and pathways to ensure that we are offering realistic and coherent choices to students, reduce complexity across a wide range of systems and processes, and maintain the attractiveness of our courses to future applicants.
Where we are now
Phase two, Curriculum Review, offered an opportunity for course teams, working in partnership with students and department and faculty colleagues, to review and make changes to their courses for 2027 entry through a structured and centrally supported curriculum quality enhancement process.
The PEP team has worked throughout the process to support and enable faculty education teams to undertake their reviews, including attending regular and ad-hoc meetings with colleagues, and through running regular meetings of PEP’s Academic Advisory Group, which includes in membership faculty Vice-Deans (Education) and Directors of Education and Student Experience.
Through Part B of the review, which ran up to August 2025, course teams have made changes to curriculum content including course learning aims and outcomes, module diet structures and assessment and feedback strategies. The review is underpinned by the Curriculum Definitions and Curriculum Design Principles that we developed in conversation with the UCL community in the 2024/25 academic year.
Hear from colleagues involved
Professor Nicola Walshe , Pro-Director Education for the UCL Institute of Education (Ioe), shared with us: "The PEP2B quality enhancement review process has been an exciting and ambitious opportunity for teams to work together to review and develop their programmes, ensuring we are offering the very best educational experience for our students. I am extremely proud of the collaborative and committed approach Ioe colleagues have taken, especially considering some significant challenges in the process, and I hope this marks a shift towards a more continuous and streamlined approach to programme development in the future."
Ben Fowler, Director of Education and Student Experience for the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, added: "PEP has been a great catalyst for collaboration across our faculty. The main example of this is in our undergraduate modern language delivery, which is spread across several departments, and is where we have set up a working party to agree a consistent and high-quality approach to teaching, course structure and assessment across each of the levels.
"Students will enjoy a more consistent experience if they study a language in two different departments or combine a language with another subject. For staff this will reduce the time spent on managing, enhancing and updating courses in the future as we can manage languages together rather than individually.
"Making these changes through PEP has been far quicker than going through the standard amendment process. Although staff have felt the short-term frustration that’s inevitable when it comes to making these changes, we have been able to focus on the benefit to our future selves in 2027/28 when we will experience the benefits of the outcomes of the effort."
Learn more
You can find more details and resources on the PEP SharePoint and an overview as part of our Education Excellence pages.
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