RAPPORT
institutions to incoming students. In
Scotland, universities and colleges faced
the challenge of implementing the
Scottish Universities’ innovation and
enterprise policy at the same time as
supporting widening participation, with
increased financial stringency. Key
authors (Chickering & Gamson 1987;
Gibbs 2010) had highlighted the
importance of the type and extent of the
relationships between students and staff:
‘Frequent student-faculty contact in and
out of classes is the most important
factor in student motivation and
involvement’ (Chickering & Gamson
1987), while a study of students’
perceptions of HE undertaken for the UK
Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) by
Kings College London (Kandiko et al.
2013) reported that students value faceto-face
interactions for learning and
support; and that students’ concerns
relating to employability led them to focus
on ‘‘process’ and development
opportunities rather than ‘product’
statistics’. A key recommendation from
this study was that ‘the role and function
of personal and academic tutors may
need to be revised at some institutions.
Students should have clear avenues for
support that they are comfortable using
for personal and academic concerns’
(Recommendation 20).
Given all of the above, strategies for
implementing more effective and
meaningful support for students in
relation to both their academic and wider
development was rising up institutional
agendas, a view reinforced at the first
Tutoring in the 21st Century seminar run
Issue 5 (August 2020)
by the CRA at Aston University in
January 2014. That event brought
together representatives of the QAA,
SEDA, the National Union of Students
(NUS) and thirty HEIs to discuss the
current state and nature of personal and
academic tutoring.
The day was also used to inform the
subsequent structure of the award:
delegates were asked to define the
attributes of effective personal and
academic tutoring and from this came the
specialist outcomes of the award and the
proposal to develop it with SEDA as part
of the SEDA Professional Development
Framework (PDF). In the implementation
SEDA acted as the awarding institution,
with CRA developing, marketing,
delivering and assessing the Award (the
latter including the involvement of a
formal external assessment element).
We therefore built the Award within the
context of the SEDA Professional
Development Framework, which
identifies values 1 and core development
outcomes 2 which any locally designed
programme – in this case centred upon
personal and academic tutoring - must
show that it assesses. The SEDA core
development outcomes themselves
emphasise the reflective process of
professional development, emphasising
the responsibility of individuals for their
own development and the scheme
requirement for them to identify a
process for this, hence our commitment
to reflection and planning was not that far
from our thinking after all! Finally our
specialist outcomes, informed by the
1
See https://www.seda.ac.uk/seda-values-andpdf
(accessed 04.03.20)
2
At https://www.seda.ac.uk/core-developmentoutcomes
(accessed 04.03.20)
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