Student Success Officers: Enhancing Outcomes through Monitoring and Intervention

Holly McCallum (Abertay University ); Dorothea Tsatsali (Abertay University)

How does Abertay University measure engagement and promote support and positive outcomes for students? A key enabler for this is the role of Student Success Officer, whose remit is to monitor attendance and engagement by looking at attendance records and the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to highlight students requiring early support. The SSOs are recent graduates of Abertay which creates a comfortable and empathetic environment with students at the centre of it. Any student highlighted with low engagement will be contacted by the SSOs in the gentle form of a “check-in”. Checking-in promotes understanding and helps guide students and signpost to relevant services. The contacting process is a significant part in student support as it creates a partnership between the students and the institution with the common goal of the success – whatever that might look like for each student, informed by the Framework for Student Engagement through Partnership (Healey et al., 2014).

This is an early-stage intervention that allows students to receive support with any challenges evolved by the model reported by Millard and Janjua (2020). These processes also inform and advise the institution on the services needed by students as well as contribute to positive outcomes for student success and retention. The response to these early-stage interventions has been received by students as proof of the duty of care the University has towards student learning and success (Millard et al., 2025). Other institutions have reported higher retaining rates with early interventions of high-risk students (Thomas, 2012). Therefore, it is important to recognise the wider factors that affect student engagement. As student needs evolve, so should our understanding and adapt support. Many students will arrive with different backgrounds, life experience and academic readiness therefore this support will be tailored accordingly, and early interventions are essential to support academic progress and wellbeing. We can seek to ensure the transition to university is more successful, by creating a proactive approach that considers the individuality of each student and their needs. This session will report on SSO findings and explore how professional services may evolve in the future to support successful student outcomes.

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Integrated Academic Literacies and Personal Tutoring: Strengthening Student Preparedness and Graduate Capability in an MPH Global Health Programme

Manju Pallam (Manchester Metropolitan University); Ruth Phillips (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Within the Master of Public Health curriculum at Manchester Metropolitan University, academic literacies are developed across all modules to reveal the hidden curriculum and increase skill and confidence with criticality, research principles and assessment; a pedagogic approach consistent with scholarship emphasising that academic literacies are most effectively developed when integrated within disciplinary curricula. Such integration enhances relevance, authenticity and opportunities for sustained practice (Thesen & Rosario, 2019; Abegglen, Burns & Sinfield, 2023), especially when complemented by structured academic advising and personal tutoring. The latter provides an additional relational dimension of support, facilitating students’ understanding of expectations, encouraging reflective learning and enabling them to navigate the challenges inherent in postgraduate study. Initial qualitative feedback indicated that students reported more confidence, better engagement with complex global-health content and improved capacity to manage academic workload in consequence of this approach. These outcomes reflect that of existing research which demonstrates the value of relational, embedded support in strengthening retention, engagement and academic preparedness (Thomas, 2021; Baughan, 2023). This talk will therefore elucidate how an integrated model of embedded academic literacies and personalised advising can reduce barriers to academic achievement, enhance postgraduate preparedness and contribute meaningfully to the development of transferable research, analytical and communication competencies, to underpin strong graduate outcomes.

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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)

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