The perennial debate about what constitutes quality in undergraduate education has been reignited recently, not least by a range of published research, select committee activity, tightening of resource, and the large-scale review by lord browne. as the organisation dedicated to enhancing the quality of students’ learning experiences, the higher education academy is pleased, through this piece of work, to contribute further to this important debate. our starting-point is twofold: first, that higher education should be a transformative process that supports the development of graduates who can make a meaningful contribution to wider society, local communities and to the economy. second, that any discussion around quality needs to be evidence-informed. as a result, we identified a need to synthesise and make sense of the scattered research in the field of higher education quality. we wanted to find out what the research evidence tells us and what further work we can do to apply the relevant findings in our quest to improve the quality of student learning in uK higher education. Graham Gibbs states that the most important conclusion of this report is that what best predicts educational gain is measures of educational process: in other words, what institutions do with their resources to make the most of the students they have. examining the evidence, he draws conclusions about some key topics that have been the subject of much debate around quality. for example, he concludes that the number of class contact hours has very little to do with educational quality, independently of what happens in those hours, what the pedagogical model is, and what the consequences are for the quantity and quality of independent study hours. he also reiterates research (nasr et al., 1996) that shows that teachers who have teaching qualifications (normally a Postgraduate certificate in higher education, or something similar) have been found to be rated more highly by their students than teachers who have no such qualification. i think this is a crucial point. at the academy we believe that high quality teaching should be delivered by academic staff who are appropriately qualified and committed to their continuing professional development. To this end we will continue to provide and develop an adaptable framework for accredited teaching qualifications in he, incorporating the uK Professional standards framework and other relevant teaching qualifications. we will also continue to work with heis to develop and manage cPd frameworks for learning and teaching. The report also concludes that some dimensions of quality are difficult to quantify, and it is therefore difficult to see what effect they might have. aspects of