Session Outline

“Course, Career, Community, Caring”: International PGT Construction Students’ Experiences of the LJMU Personal Tutoring Framework in a Time of Change

sonia tandon (Liverpool john moores university); Sian Dunne (Liverpool John Moores University)

From 2025/26, Liverpool John Moores University is implementing a new Personal Tutoring Framework that promotes locally designed approaches aligned to a set of core institutional outcomes and four dimensions of delivery: Course (academic success), Career (employability and future options), Community (belonging and identity) and Caring (health and wellbeing).

In parallel, international postgraduate students in project and construction management are navigating shifting visa regulations, economic uncertainty and rapidly evolving professional expectations, intensifying the need for effective, joined-up academic advising.

This session reports on a mixed-methods evaluation of how international Master’s students on project and construction management programmes at LJMU experience the new Personal Tutoring Framework in practice, and how personal tutoring can better address the complex barriers they face. Phase 1 uses an online questionnaire, structured around the four framework dimensions and core student outcomes (belonging and mattering, confidence in contacting tutors, understanding the learning journey, overcoming barriers, and awareness of employability pathways and specialist services).

The survey explores academic transition, assessment literacy, communication with tutors, use of support services, digital/AI practices, wellbeing, and career planning, with specific attention to visa, financial and cultural pressures. Phase 2 comprises follow-up focus groups that invite international students to co-create enhancements to local tutoring models within the School’s Theory of Change approach.

Preliminary findings will highlight where international PGT students feel well supported across Course, Career, Community and Caring, and where gaps remain between the intended institutional outcomes and lived experience. Participants will be invited to interrogate the emerging data, compare it with their own institutional contexts, and collaboratively draft design principles for inclusive, outcomes-driven advising with international cohorts in professionally focused disciplines.

By situating international student voice within an institution-wide tutoring framework, the session directly addresses the conference theme “Advising in a Time of Change”, showing how personal tutoring can be adapted to meet diverse and interconnected challenges at programme and institutional level.

Can tutoring still be personal? Provocations and prompt questions about the future of personal academic tutoring in UK HE’s increasingly risk-directed environment

Ruth Windscheffel (York St John University)

UK higher education is increasingly shaped by a risk-directed culture. This shift reflects ongoing volatility across the sector: chronic underinvestment, real-terms erosion of fee income, recruitment inequalities, fluctuating international student numbers, and existential challenges posed by generative AI to the very ‘idea’ of the university. These pressures have intensified institutional hyper-awareness of risk, themselves reinforced by regulatory frameworks that embed risk management into core practices (Department for Education, 2017).

Access and Participation Plans (APP) now hinge on identifying risks to disadvantaged students. Institutional performance against the Teaching Excellence Framework and the likelihood of regulatory investigation are assessed through the lens of risk - particularly the risk of failing to meet OfS benchmarks for continuation, completion, and progression under its ‘B3’ conditions. (Office for Students, 2022). One of the newest regulatory requirements, E6, rightly aims to reduce sexual misconduct and harassment (Office for Students, 2024). Yet its potential implications for one of the most personal staff-student relationships - the bond between personal tutor and tutee - remain largely unexplored.

Personal academic tutoring has always been complex, marked by ambiguity and vulnerability. Tutors routinely navigate sensitive disclosures, blurred boundaries between academic and personal issues and questions of fairness in a system often dominated by student demand rather than equitable access. Increasingly, tutors must also prioritise self-care and self-protection, and debates over how tutoring should have professional standards of practice have gathered pace in recent years (Walker, 2020). Stricter institutional policies on personal relationships amplify the risk of complaints or disciplinary action but there is a lack of consistency across the sector, (Rowsell, 2025) leaving tutors potentially exposed for fulfilling a pastoral role that has existed for centuries.

This raises urgent questions: if tutors no longer feel safe, what future does the traditional model of personal tutoring have? Will academics continue to embrace this responsibility as part of their practice, or will the role be ceded entirely to professional support staff with specialised training? What does this mean for student belonging, success, and wellbeing?

This lightning talk is deliberately provocative. It seeks to spotlight an underexplored risk area in personal academic tutoring and to stimulate sector-wide dialogue. By posing key questions about boundaries, equity, sustainability and the viability of tutoring in a risk-averse environment, the session aims to reassure colleagues that these concerns are shared and pressing. More importantly, it offers an opportunity for the tutoring and advising community to collaborate on practical responses and remedies at both local and national levels.

Bridging the Gap for Vocational Students: Using Entry Profile Insights to Transform Personal Tutoring

Lindsey Munro (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Vocational pathways bring diverse talents, experiences, and ambitions into Higher Education, yet students entering via BTECs, apprenticeships, Access courses and other vocational routes continue to experience differential outcomes in attainment, retention, and graduate success in some areas. Support is available from a wide variety of people and parts of the university ecosystem – but it is easy for students to feel overwhelmed and it can be difficult to identify and engage with the support they need. We are exploring how insights from a deeper understanding of students’ prior learning can be used to provide more tailored support through personal tutoring. We are building a targeted, subject-specific approach that integrates data intelligence with student partnership to enable personal tutors and lecturers to deliver personalised support that builds belonging, strengthens an understanding of how to learn and engage with activities, and improves progression and ultimately graduate outcomes.

This talk will discuss three key elements of this project: (1) An analysis of the student entry profile for each subject to understand who our students are when they arrive, their aspirations, and challenges, (2) synthesis of entry qualifications into concise “Entry pathway skills maps” outlining core curricula, typical competencies, strengths and gaps in an accessible format for staff and (3) student insights into the barriers they face and effective support mechanisms, shaping “Tutoring Insight Briefs”. The integration of these elements will provide personal tutors and lecturers with more tailored guidance on how best to support their students.

The key objectives are to highlight the importance of gaining a deeper understanding of students’ prior experience and also to help students’ articulate and engage with support / approaches that will enable them to demonstrate their full potential. These insights will also be used to scaffold the learning experience in class.

During the talk, the audience will be able to share their perceptions and assumptions about the strengths (and gaps) of different entry qualifications, along with sharing approaches they have found effective in supporting students from vocational backgrounds.

Learning Outcomes

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