Workload, Stress, and Well-being: A Human Factors Script for Personal Tutoring

Frank Alparslan (University of Northampton)

The script has three parts: (1) reduce pressure and create psychological safety (“You’re not in trouble; I just want to understand what’s making things hard right now”), (2) check workload and stress signals using simple prompts (sleep/fatigue, competing demands, concentration, deadlines), and (3) act proportionately using a traffic-light next-step guide (self-management support, follow-up, or signposting/escalation). The talk ends with practical phrases tutors can copy, plus a one-page prompt guide that delegates can adapt to their own support services and safeguarding routes.

Audience involvement is light-touch: a 30-second reflection prompt and a quick “choose your next step” poll using a vignette. Questions can follow at the end of the lightning talk set.

Learning Outcomes

Bibliography

Embedding Wellbeing into Personal Tutoring: A Preventative, Practice-Led Approach

Jennifer Stockdale (University of Nottingham)

This Lightning Talk presents an evidence-informed approach to embedding growth mindset and wellbeing principles within a Foundation Science skills module and its associated student-centred personal tutoring framework at the University of Nottingham.

Tutorials were deliberately structured into two complementary strands: academic group tutorials and pastoral tutorials. Academic tutorials focused on skills development and academic advising, while pastoral tutorials provided structured opportunities for reflection, discussion, and wellbeing-informed conversations. This clear separation enabled tutors to support student wellbeing in ways that were purposeful, inclusive, and professionally bounded, while remaining academically legitimate and non-stigmatising.

Central to the redesign was supporting students to develop a growth mindset, encouraging them to view challenges and setbacks as opportunities for learning and development. Tutors adopted a developmental advising approach, guiding students to take responsibility for their learning by reflecting on behaviours and study strategies, and by evaluating what worked for them individually. Reflection activities across both academic and pastoral tutorials fostered self-awareness, confidence, and problem-solving skills—key contributors to student wellbeing, belonging, and academic success.

Rather than teaching wellbeing interventions didactically, students developed core academic and transferable skills (such as evaluating research, referencing, and creating infographics) while engaging with scholarly literature on wellbeing. This approach supported the development of mental health literacy and awareness of accessible, non-pharmacological wellbeing strategies (including sleep, physical activity, and nutrition), without the resistance often associated with sessions explicitly labelled as “mental health”.

Students’ resilience was measured at two time points (October and May) using the Resilience Scale for Young Adults, assessing sense of mastery, sense of relatedness, and emotional reactivity, alongside questions on growth mindset and lifestyle behaviours. Findings suggest a positive effect of the curriculum- and tutoring-based intervention, including increased sense of relatedness and reduced emotional reactivity—outcomes closely aligned with students’ sense of mattering, connection, and persistence.

This session will demonstrate how personal tutoring and academic advising can act as effective preventative wellbeing interventions when embedded within routine academic practice. Delegates will leave with practical examples of tutorial structures, reflective prompts, and evaluation approaches that can be adapted to their own contexts, offering a scalable and sustainable model for supporting student wellbeing while remaining firmly grounded in academic development.

Learning Outcomes

Bibliography

Affective Futurity and Motivation for Student Support Seeking

Lisa Appleyard-Keeling (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Engaging in Higher Education study is an emotional, affective endeavour. Yet increasingly, institutions are moving towards a systematised business model of tutoring (Yale, 2019) that adopts a multi-faceted metric focussed approach driven by big data (Richardson and Stepniak, 2025). While student engagement, progression, continuation, and student outcomes are inevitable consequences of mass education, they can shape an approach that cements tutoring within a transactional design, emblematic of the marketisation of the HEI sector (Wakelin, 2023). Poor quality tutoring impacts more negatively than no tutoring (Yale, 2019). Systemised output-driven tutoring can feel inauthentically impersonal (Prowse, Ruiz Vargas and Powell, 2021) especially to minoritised students who may arrive in HEIs with institutionally unrecognised stresses (Gabi et al., 2024).

Recognition of the affective, and embodied student experience is particularly important within disciplines that attract students from minoritised demographics. This is seen in the Department of Social Care and Social Work, where student demographics show a high percentage of students who are care experienced, racially minoritised, first generation, neurodiverse, and entering with vocational qualifications. For many of our students, the roadmap of academic study is an uncharted landscape. For students from educationally privileged households, higher education is a recognised landscape with well-imagined future outcomes, which shapes both understanding of, and motivation for, support-seeking. We acknowledge that this support-seeking is often via informal networks such as seeking guidance from family and friends. However, for many “widening participation” students, understanding of support-seeking can be limited to a deficit-based framing, originating from the negative connotations of special educational needs and additional support at school. Once in HE, this notion becomes sharpened by a belief that ‘independent study’ means alone and unaided. Limited knowledge of what university-study really means, combined with negative perceptions of support-seeking combine to diminish motivation for honest and open support-seeking.

We argue that motivation to seek-support is intrinsically linked to student success and, yet it is an ‘affective futurity’ (Zembylas, 2025) because it is dependent on both an ability to imagine future outcomes and an ability to imagine that support-seeking will be accepted; motivation for support-seeking is therefore intertwined with a sense of belonging. However, affective futurity can become ‘unmotivating’ without understanding of the factors which shape success (Kahu and Nelson, 2018) - including recognising that support-seeking is a fundamental aspect of the hidden curriculum within the successful student’s educational journey.

Tutoring that actively highlights the inter-relational aspects of learning, while making transparent the hidden curriculum, supports understanding of positive affective futurity ultimately building a sense of trust, and therefore belonging.

Using Padlet in this session offers interactive opportunities for a co-created re-imagining of vocabulary that reshapes student understanding of an inter-relational and future-focused tutoring model.

Co-authored with Louise Barnes (louise.barnes@mmu.ac.uk)

Learning Outcomes

Bibliography