Session Outline

This problem-solving session is co-designed and delivered by staff and SU from York St John University. It addresses the evolving challenges of delivering and sustaining meaningful personal academic tutoring in today’s UK higher education context.

Traditionally, tutoring has been valued as a close, personalised and sustained relationship between academic staff and students. However, this model is under increasing pressure from sector-wide tensions, organisational changes, and diverging expectations of what tutoring should be (e.g., Hopkins, 2014; Hensby & Naylor, 2024). To remain relevant and effective, tutoring must adapt.

Across UK HE, institutions face mounting demands to do more with less: increasing student numbers whilst reducing staff, delivering a personalised experience that fosters belonging whilst simultaneously outsourcing or professionalising student support services. Academic staff are contending with heavier workloads, performance pressures, mental health challenges and job insecurity. As personal tutors, they must navigate unprecedented levels of student mental-health need, fluctuating engagement, the impact of generative AI on study and pastoral care and the expectations of increasingly diverse student cohorts (Phelan, 2025). Added to this are regulatory requirements - such as OfS’s E6 condition - emphasising strict boundaries in staff-student interactions (Augustus et al, 2023). Meanwhile, students face intense pressures to achieve good degrees, secure graduate-level employment and manage complex personal circumstances including work commitments, caring responsibilities and long-term health conditions.

These multi-causal factors threaten the viability of personal tutoring as a cornerstone of UK HE (Jones et al, 2025). At York St John University (YSJU), staff and Student Union leaders collaborated to explore these challenges and their implications. Our shared experiences revealed widening gaps between tutors and tutees: differences in age, culture, educational background and expectations of tutoring’s purpose and delivery. If left unaddressed, these gaps risk undermining tutoring’s effectiveness.

Key questions guided our inquiry:

• How can these gaps be bridged to empower students in their studies, lives, and future careers?

• How might tutoring be reasserted or reconfigured as a vital touchpoint for academic progress, career planning and meaningful dialogue?

To answer these, we convened workshops with staff and students, examining local data (student lifecycle statistics, survey outcomes, engagement committee minutes, SU feedback). Together, we co-created some practical strategies to:

• Bridge gaps between tutors and tutees

• Keep tutoring relevant by fostering belonging and empowerment

• Ensure sustainability through scalable, safe delivery models

This session will share these strategies and invite participants to contribute their own experiences and solutions. Attendees will engage in collaborative problem-solving, generating ideas to address similar challenges in their institutions. Insights gathered will inform YSJU’s new Community of Practice for personal tutors and shape discussions with our Student Council and SU/University Liaison Group. A follow-up webinar for UKAT will be offered to report on implementation and impact.

Learning Outcomes

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