Dr Amy Bywater

Dr Amy Bywater is Associate Dean for Educational Quality, Student Experience and Academic Operational Performance at UK Management College. She provides strategic leadership across academic quality, inclusive practice, student experience, and the operational delivery of teaching and learning, ensuring that institutional values are embedded coherently across academic and professional services.

Dr Bywater is the institutional lead for UKMC’s core academic and student-facing frameworks, including the Inclusive Curriculum Framework, English Proficiency Framework, Career Readiness Framework, and the Student Engagement, Belonging and Academic Challenge Framework. Together, these frameworks underpin UKMC’s approach to inclusive academic practice, student success, progression, and regulatory alignment, and provide a clear evidence base for quality assurance, enhancement, and OfS compliance.

She holds a Doctor of Education (EdD) with a focus on quality in teaching and higher education, alongside an MA in Education. Her academic and professional career spans over two decades across secondary and higher education. Prior to working in higher education, Dr Bywater held senior pastoral and academic leadership roles in a 2–18 grammar school, including Head of Physical Education and Head of House, where she led whole-school initiatives around wellbeing, inclusion, and student development.

Dr Bywater spent eight and a half years at the University of Wolverhampton as Senior Lecturer in Physical Education and School Sport, alongside serving as Inclusivity Lead. During this time, she led institutionally recognised work on belonging, engagement, and inclusive curriculum design, and played a key role in attainment gap reduction, student engagement initiatives, and staff development in inclusive pedagogies.

Her research expertise centres on quality in teaching, inclusive and relational pedagogies, student belonging and engagement, and educational leadership. She is particularly known for her conceptual work on Quality in Physical Education Teaching (Q/qPET), which reframes educational quality as relational, reflexive, and human. Her wider scholarship explores inclusion, care, student voice, and the lived experience of learning across educational contexts, bridging theory, practice, and policy.

At UKMC, Dr Bywater works closely with academic leaders, professional services, and student-facing teams to align curriculum, teaching practice, wellbeing support, and academic governance. Her leadership is grounded in a strong commitment to inclusive education, educational integrity, and the creation of learning environments where all students and staff are able to belong, flourish, and achieve their potential.