Academic Personal Tutoring plays a big role in encouraging students to feel they belong on their course. It helps build confidence and supports academic development, continuation and success.
Continuation Priority 2b: We will advance our personal tutoring model to ensure all students feel they matter, drawing on significant expertise from across the University.
The experience of students and their relationship with the University during COVID-19 led to a re-evaluation of the existing structure of personal tutoring at Leeds. The pandemic reinforced that there really is no such thing as a ‘typical student’; everyone has their own needs, challenges and issues to deal with.
We undertook an institutional review of personal tutoring which led to an appreciation of this localised context and the realisation that the structured model for personal tutoring was too rigid to deal with the variety of experiences and issues that each school and department needed to support. As a result, personal tutors were renamed Academic Personal Tutors (APTs) to reinforce the focus on student success within the context of the specific academic School. The value of the APT role is explicitly linked to achieving the University's core strategic priorities.
Developing a more flexible approach
The transition, welcome and induction period and the first year are particularly vital in fostering the sense of belonging that’s so necessary for academic and personal success at university. Ensuring those tutor/tutee relationships are successfully established and maintained requires a different approach to that needed in students’ second or third years of study. Some disciplines need additional, or a different type of, support at different times.
The institutional review established a template for a tutoring relationship which could be used as guidance, rather than followed word-for-word, and adapted by tutoring teams in different schools and departments to fit in with the requirements of their students and study programmes.
Making the guidance work
Schools adapted the guidance to suit their needs, varying the quantity of meetings and the type of support offered. For example:
School of Medicine
Half of all the students in the School of Medicine are on the largest programme we offer, the MBChB programme – a five-year course, two years longer than a typical undergraduate degree. Alongside this, students face multiple measures of success, such as the GMC and Royal Colleges along with the usual in-house assessment.
Previously, different APTs took over after the first two years to reflect the change in focus to clinical work and assessments rather than the heavy classroom-based content of the first two years. Although in theory this sounds sensible, in practice it was disruptive and many clinical APTs, being practising doctors, are increasingly stretched by the demands within the NHS and cannot always find as much time as they would like to for scheduled tutoring sessions.
Andrea McGoverin, Head of Student Support at the School of Medicine, says:
“In this model, we found some students lacked continuity of pastoral care, and it was a burden on them to have to start afresh with another APT, especially if they were having difficulties, either academically or with personal or health problems. Retelling their story was not easy and new relationships had to be built at a busy time in their training and education. There was also a degree of dissatisfaction for the APTs who had to let go after two years of getting to know their students.”
Due to these reasons and following Andrea’s participation in a LITE Fellowship on Reverse Mentoring, the School of Medicine’s APT model has now changed, putting the accent on continuity to emphasise consistent support for their students.
“I got a lot out of the Reverse Mentoring project – I was paired with an International 2nd Year Law Student and learned how important it is for the student to build an authentic relationship with an APT, and that it is more about the right person with the right skills, rather than their job title and role when it comes to being an effective APT.”
The templates are used for guidance but, as Andrea says, “It's not just about passing the degree. There are other drivers.
“We know the kind of things our students face that they might want to discuss with an Academic Personal Tutor. In medicine, it's more about pastoral care. That's what they're really getting from the Academic Personal Tutors. It's different because other students on other non-clinical courses are being taught by academics but, in medicine, a lot of them are doctors who can share their experience of professional clinical settings.”
School of Electrical Engineering
The School of Electrical Engineering uses the templates as guiding principles rather than a rigid APT model. “In our case this works because these students need access to a constant community and regular events where students can meet academics,” says Dr Paolo Actis, Associate Professor in Bionanotechnology.
“If students need anything, they can come to us anytime whether it's scheduled or not. We are a relatively small school and it's easy for academics to interact informally with students, which may not work so easily for other schools.”
The School is looking to further develop bespoke content for the cross-institutional Pebblepad workbook to set a clear academic purpose to the APT tutoring sessions, supporting students as they build up a portfolio of skills.
“Sort of like a pilot's logbook, our students could log their practical skills after their lab sessions, and these can be reviewed in APT meetings. It could be a good opportunity to give students that time to reflect on the core practical skills of their degree and make connections across the different modules.”
School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS)
POLIS offers a mix of one-to-one and group meetings. While engagement with Academic Personal Tutoring is not linked to degree credits, students are strongly encouraged to participate in the process, and the benefits of sustained engagement with their APT throughout their degrees are emphasised and explained.
Group meetings are designed to foster a sense of belonging among tutees, allowing them to share experiences of study at Leeds in a supportive environment. One-to-one meetings have a strong academic focus, centring discussion of the skills that students are developing throughout their degrees and the academic challenges they face. In particular, a one-to-one meeting in semester 2 is framed as an opportunity to constructively discuss each tutee’s feedback on their January assignments, identifying patterns in their feedback and opportunities for further development.
“Overall, we feel we have translated the new university approach into something that's workable for us in POLIS,” says James Souter, APT Lead at the School.
Next steps
It is great to see the different ways that Schools have responded to the new APT guidance. Professor Paul Taylor, Dean of Student Experience at the University of Leeds says: “This case study absolutely reinforces the approach the University of Leeds has taken to Academic Personal Tutoring over recent years. Schools have taken the principles and expectations around Academic Personal Tutoring articulated by the University and implemented them successfully in their local contexts. No single model for Academic Personal Tutoring will suit all Schools but we can share a common approach to ensure all our students thrive.”
Yet, there is still work to be done. There’s an overall need to ensure that the benefits of the APT framework are extended to postgraduate students, and we will be exploring how to make APT a rewarding professional route for academics, making it more inclusive, and how we can best use technology to support APT meetings.
Rachael O’Connor, an Associate Professor in the School of Law, has recently become the new Lead for APT across the institution. She is focusing on a community-centred approach to APT, bringing in the voices of students, academic staff and professional services staff, as well as University leadership, to ensure the APT system continues to work for and reward everyone involved. Rachael is working closely with recently appointed graduate intern Sophie Connor to develop a vision for the future of APT at Leeds. The work Rachael has done with staff and students from across the University on reverse mentoring will closely inform this work.
Rachael says: “It’s critical that in trying to improve and develop positive cultures around APT, we bring the community members with us. APT is a vital relationship and whilst there is lots of good practice going on Leeds, there is always more we could do and ways we could enhance our practice, particularly more closely aligning APT with our Access and Student Success goals. I’m really looking forward to working with colleagues and students in the coming years to further develop our vision for authentic and inclusive APT at Leeds for all students.”
To find out more about how the University of Leeds is advancing its APT model, email the Student Success team: studentsuccess@leeds.ac.uk.