Students as Partners: Harnessing the Power of Student Voice to Shape Personal Academic Tutoring

Sarah Chapman (University of Southampton); Joshie Christian (University of Southampton)

How can personal academic tutoring evolve to meet the expectations of today’s students and empower their futures?

This presentation argues that the answer lies in authentic partnership and the power of student voice to drive meaningful change. Co-presented by the Head of Student Projects and Engagement and the Vice President Education of our Students’ Union, a mathematics student, it will showcase how the University of Southampton is embedding student perspectives at the heart of its institutional approach to academic tutoring.

We will briefly introduce the University of Southampton’s current PAT project, which aims to reimagine tutoring as a cornerstone of belonging, wellbeing, and academic success. We will demonstrate how student perspectives have been embedded throughout its design and delivery and how students are actively involved as partners in decision-making. Central to this work are our Student Co-Design Panels, which operate on a Students as Partners model to co-create solutions, and our Student Advisory Group, a team of student interns, ensuring the project remains grounded in real student experience.

The bulk of the session will focus on what students themselves have told us they want from a PAT in today’s higher education landscape. Drawing on insights from the Students’ Union Student Experience Survey, additional research led by student reps, and feedback gathered through partnership activities, we will present a clear picture of student priorities. The session will spotlight student voices—what they tell us about belonging and support. These include the qualities and behaviours they value most in tutors, the support they expect for academic, professional and personal development, and the role of tutoring in fostering belonging.

Student voices have had a significant impact on institutional practice, shaping the development of a new Personal Academic Tutor role descriptor and an academic tutoring framework at Southampton—clear evidence of how partnership can lead to meaningful change.

Attendees will leave with practical insights into what students say matters most, and how embedding partnership approaches can transform tutoring into a truly empowering experience.

Learning Outcomes

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Meaningful dialogue and flexibility - student voices and staff perspectives on a co-creation approach to advising

Neil Morrison (University of Manchester); Sonia Balan (University of Manchester)

Student and staff workload is high. Academic leadership is under increasing pressure to reduce load, cut meetings, and increase flexibility (for staff). Often, the benefit of the flexibility given to the advisor is not passed on to student. Talking 1-on-1 with staff builds confidence and empathy (Folsom et al., 2015), but students need advisors whenever they need them, whereas advisors can only offer meetings when it suits their diary and many find it difficult to follow-up or respond timely. This disparity of expectations is often cited as a factor behind disengagement or apathy from either side (Bovill, 2017). Senior advisors do what they can to support academic advisors with resources and guidance for the professional and informational components of their role, aiming to encourage the relational component as the advisor's primary focus (Grey & Osborne, 2018), but there remains an overall premium on time and headroom. How can advising models adjust for students to get the most out of what is left?

In this talk we give early reflections on an approach in which the advisee and advisor co-create the format and agenda for their dialogue, setting a fluid timeline for their meetings and other milestones, and aiming for a confluence of expectations. When students take ownership of their academic journey, they often thrive and develop confidence, and an advisee experiences their progress on a far shorter timescale than the advisor can observe it through timetabled meetings. While the advisor ultimately has the responsibility of gauging when an advisee would benefit from an explicit agenda, and when it would be more suitable to talk informally with an implicit underlying agenda to the conversation, a co-creation approach makes both advisor and advisee accountable in setting targets and measuring progress. Mindful of overall workload pressures on both parties, we recommend conversational and informal dialogue take precedence over formal written action plans in general, although the co-creation approach should be inherently flexible to decide this on an individual basis (Prosser, 1993). A key takeaway for attendees is a flexible template for senior advisors, with optional pre-meeting questionnaires and discussion plans (Wakelin, 2023) providing a middle ground and a bespoke element. Aspects of how to evaluate our approach's impact going forward will be discussed.

Overall, we aim to encourage student-staff co-creation in the context of academic advising, and reflection on how both advisee and advisor can make meaningful use of their limited interaction time. Our talk is itself a student-staff co-creation by Sonia Balan, a third-year MMath student and Dr Neil Morrison, a Senior Lecturer, at the University of Manchester.

Learning Outcomes

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