Authors:
Dr David Grey, CEO of UK Advising and Tutoring (UKAT)
Dr Michael Talbot, University of Greenwich and UKAT Trustee
Dr Rachel Maxwell, Principal Advisor, Solutionpath
We are thrilled to have worked with Dr David Grey, CEO at UKAT, and Dr Michael Talbot from the University of Greenwich and also a UKAT trustee, to produce this article where we explore the importance of personal tutoring to students at university in the UK. In this article, the term ‘personal tutoring’ can be taken to refer to different types of advising and tutoring known by different terms across the sector including Personal Academic Tutors, Academic Advisors, Mentors, Coaches etc.
As the providers of the StREAM student engagement analytics platform, we at Solutionpath recognise the importance of the personal tutor role. Indeed, StREAM is designed primarily to enable staff working in any kind of pastoral or academic advising or support role through providing them with a clear risk radar around student (dis)-engagement and an intervention lifecycle that helps ensure that students can meaningfully access the right support as quickly as possible. Students tend to disengage academically when circumstances in their lives become difficult and StREAM picks up on the digital signals of this disengagement providing an opportunity for staff to reach out and offer support if needed. Identifying issues early can help prevent those issues from becoming crises arising in students’ lives that may result ultimately in their withdrawal from university. Having the active, personal support from a member of staff during any study or life-related issue can be the difference between graduation and withdrawal.
Personal tutoring can take many forms, but at its heart the aim of personal tutoring is to support students in their academic, professional, and personal development. Personal tutors are the linchpin in a student’s university experience. Throughout their degree, students can turn to their personal tutor who is there to provide advice on their studies and study skills, act as a signpost to help them navigate university systems, motivate them to achieve their goals, and to be there as the first port of call in a crisis.
Students need the support provided by personal tutoring more than ever. In expanding and ever more complex universities, and in trying social and economic times, personal tutors provide their tutees with a sense of belonging, a sense of direction, and a sense of their own abilities and worth. When done well, personal tutoring can be truly transformative in a student’s university experience.
The way in which personal tutoring is structured varies greatly across UK Higher Education, but it is underpinned by three main models of student support. The first is the ‘pastoral’ model, where a student is assigned to an individual member of academic staff who acts as their tutor throughout their university career, their main contact for all issues. The second is the ‘professional’ model, where students are directed straight to specialist professional support teams, be it study skills, employability, or wellbeing. The third is the ‘curriculum’ model, where the content related to personal tutoring is embedded in the subject curriculum through taught sessions and group tutorials. On their own, each of these models has potential issues, and so in practice most universities operate a combination of these three models, and many are working towards an ‘integrated’ model that takes the best elements from each model to provide a more holistic tutoring experience.
Models on their own only do so much. The most important thing a university can do is to establish a clear purpose and objectives for personal tutoring. The primary aim for any personal tutoring programme should be student success. A personal tutoring system without students at its heart is not fit for purpose. Student success means ensuring every student is given the opportunity to become the best student – and individual – they can be. This means offering students a personalised educational experience that can identify their strengths and weaknesses, and identify opportunities to build on the former and address the latter. Personal tutoring facilitates this by ensuring that each student has the chance to build a developmental, personalised relationship with their personal tutor, taking ownership of their university journey and receiving clear, empathetic, and expert guidance to support them to do this. The ultimate aim of personal tutoring is to give students the support that allows them to have the skills, knowledge, and confidence to grow academically, professionally, and personally.
Given how central personal tutoring is – or should be – to student success, it is not surprising that the role comes with some significant challenges. Three of the most common challenges expressed by personal tutors are time, expertise, and boundaries. As student numbers increase, staff can find themselves with large numbers of personal tutees, which in turn limits their ability to develop meaningful and personalised relationships. Whilst training is often offered on other aspects of the academic role, personal tutoring training has often been neglected or even non-existent. Staff have often felt unprepared to deal with the increasingly complex issues that students come with or develop at university, and this is exacerbated by increasing student numbers. University can be overwhelming, and so students often turn to their personal tutors for advice on a range of personal issues, including their mental health and a range of safeguarding concerns. Personal tutors can feel enormous pressure to help these students even when the problems presented are beyond their professional expertise, leading to important questions around the boundaries of the personal tutoring role.
UKAT does not recommend a single model for personal tutoring for the sector, but rather acts as a kind of personal tutor to personal tutors. Just as personal tutoring provides students with the support to work on their own development, UKAT offers personal tutors the tools to reflect on and enhance their practice. UKAT is not a set of rules, but a community of experts who learn together, share good practice, work through common challenges, and seek to make personal tutoring valued and recognised within UK Higher Education. UKAT aims to facilitate a culture shift in the sector to ensure consistent, student-centred personal tutoring, where institutions and individuals are recognised for their commitment to student success through personal tutoring. UKAT’s Professional Recognition scheme has been designed to support individual tutors to enhance their understanding of personal tutoring by linking personal practice to the scholarship of the field. UKAT’s Institutional Accreditation charter mark scheme, currently in pilot with a limited set of institutions across the sector, encourages institutions to adopt whole institution, evidence informed, quality enhanced, purposeful approaches to personal tutoring and student success.
Ensuring a level of consistency in the student experience around personal tutoring can be accomplished by using the StREAM student engagement analytics platform. While each and every supportive conversation with a student is different, the need to ensure that students are informed about and able to access the right support for them as quickly as possible, is consistent. Research that we conducted with students during the summer of 2023, with colleagues at Wonkhe, identified that 80% of respondents value the use of engagement data and that when it comes to a meaningful intervention from the University, contact with a personal tutor is top of the list (65% of respondents chose this option). These findings indicate that students appreciate the opportunity for their tutors to get to know them better through building positive relationships with their academic tutors and underline the importance of belonging to a successful student experience.
An objective determination of how effectively a student is engaging with their studies is achieved by combining data from student participation with educationally purposeful activities that leave a relevant digital footprint and running this data through the proprietary StREAM engagement algorithm. This objective categorisation of engagement from Very High through to Very Low helps those staff involved with personal tutoring to know which students would benefit most from a supportive outreach conversation. This approach neither precludes nor excludes outreach to students who are in the more highly engaged categories in a more proactive manner. Rather the objective determination of risk ensures that all students have the opportunity to benefit from outreach and support, whether they initiate support or not.
StREAM also ensures that students remain at the centre of the personal tutoring conversation. The in-built intervention lifecycle approach is designed to ensure that students are equal players in the determination of any follow-up activity to support re-engagement and academic success. The ability for students to proactively seek support from relevant support teams and departments across the university is backed up with a referral system that places the responsibility for outreach onto university teams in appropriate circumstances and in agreement with the students themselves.
To find out more about how StREAM can support personal tutoring at your institution, please book a Discovery Call or arrange a StREAM Demo for yourself and your colleagues.
