Personal Tutoring Review
A campaign led by Kirran Khan, VP Business
I want to overhaul the ARU personal tutoring system to ensure that it’s more effective at supporting students. The University has often said that personal tutors are the ‘first port of call’ for students in a situation (whether academic or pastoral) where support is needed. However, students I’ve spoken to disagree, saying that their personal tutors ‘took 5 days to respond to their query’, ‘didn’t show up to meetings they had arranged’, and ‘weren’t very supportive in general’.
Together, Professor Ruth Taylor (PVC Student Retention and Dean of FHSCE) and I are co-leading a review of personal tutoring. This is major project that the University and SU are doing in partnership and is on a scale of which we have not done recently. We are really excited to collaborate on this review as it means that we can work together to make the student experience of the system better. This type of partnership and collaboration fits well with our recently published Principles for Partnership with Anglia Learning and Teaching.
Campaign Aims: The project aims to look into the current system of personal tutoring at ARU, as well as other institutions to form a best practice model.
After an initial review, we will conduct focus groups and interviews with staff and students on their own individual experiences of personal tutoring.
This will then all come together to generate a list of recommendations for ARU to implement in order to make the personal tutoring system more effective and better at supporting the student experience.
Updates: At the beginning of the semester, Prof Ruth Taylor and I began co-chairing the Personal Tutor Review Advisory Group to create a plan to move forward.
In November 2017, Prof Ruth Taylor and I recruited our research assistant, Elizabeth Hale, to begin the review of our personal tutoring practices and those of other universities for comparison (this will include vision visits to other institutions in the New Year).
In second semester (early 2018), we began conducting focus groups with staff and released a survey for students to complete - both helping to shape the future of Anglia Ruskin's Personal Tutoring System.