Training for student representatives ahead of Institutional audit

What to do after the audit - a student reps' story

Presentation by Rebecca Watson, University of Sheffield Students' Union
26 May 2009 (length 14:16)

The following is a transcript of a film which can be viewed on this web page: www.qaa.ac.uk/events/studentaudittraining09/default.asp.

Rebecca Watson, University of Sheffield

OK, so I'm just going to give you my perspective on how I used the QAA Institutional audit. And as I was saying I came into my role in 2008...my predecessor was leaving. Now at Sheffield Union you can only constitutionally run for a year and after going to loads of NUS events etc I found that our union is quite different in that sense; you only have a year to make an impact and you need to make sure you're using all of the resources that are available to you.

So my predecessor had just done the student written submission. We had the audit in 2007 so I was kind of left with the aftermath of the audit. So how did I use it? I'm just going to go through a couple of steps what I did, kind of similar to in the timeframe...timeline exercise that we've just done.

So step one, read the document, ensure you get past copies. So, my last audit was in 2007, the audit before that was 2003, so I had both the copies in front of me at the start of the year...for example my main campaign of the year has been personal tutors, so I looked in both audits and thought, right, 2003, 2007, that's a five year/ four year difference...has the personal tutorials system changed dramatically, has the university done anything about it?

So, this is a clause from the QAA Institutional audit of my university in 2007. This is actually in the annex of the report. So it says: 'Student written submission refers to variations in provision of personal tutorial support between departments and suggests that the institution's good policy on personal tutoring is not always adhered to'...just to pick that out...and also...'with regard to allocation of tutor and frequency of meetings'.

So this kind of struck alarms bells for me, I thought, right OK, the student written submission has picked this out, this was on the audit, let's see what the university have done about it. So then I went back to 2003 and it was similar lines again: 'some evidence of student dissatisfaction with the disparity in departmental compliance with the university guidelines on personal tutoring and on assessment and feedback, areas also subject to comment in the 1997 audit report'.

So obviously this was saying, right, there's a variation in personally tutoring, something is wrong and it hasn’t improved since 2003. So I had good grounds for a campaign.

So as I was saying...the university had a policy, which could be emphasised and communicated to students; the university's personal tutorial system had seen no review or improvement since 2003, and possibly 1997; students had expressed dissatisfaction over a number of aspects of the personal tutorial system; and there was supporting evidence from the SSS - which is our Student Satisfaction Survey which only our university takes part in, it’s an internal survey - and the NSS to emphasise these facts, so I had good groundworks for a campaign.

So, step two, ensure that you look at all data to strengthen your case. The Institutional audit is one aspect of building a campaign, but I think the audit can be strengthened so much more if you look at other data, like we were saying, couple it with the NSS, look at different postgrad surveys etc. So, from a personal perspective, the NSS showed that personal tutorial support was lower than average; the learning and teaching committee reported that only 20 per cent of students at the institution used personal development planning, which helps personal tutors get to know their students better - so that was a real cause for concern.

Our survey carried out last year by our predecessor saw that only seven per cent of students saw their tutors once a fortnight. A dual degree survey I conducted earlier this year highlighted that only 22 per cent were happy with tutorial support in both their departments overall. And in our survey a high percentage of students had had a change of personal tutor. In fact one student had had six changes of personal tutor which was obviously worrying, especially from a student experience perspective.

After that, I kind of thought, right, I've got a good data, I've got a good database here, and I've got good groundworks for a campaign; something the university can't ignore. One thing that I've actually got from being a SAB is recognising that university really does listen to data, you can sit down with the university and say 'I didn’t really see my personal tutor and I know someone who has a really bad experience', but unless you back that up with any substantial data you can't get anywhere and the university weren't listening so I thought, right, let's use something that they can't refute, the Institutional audit, the results of the NSS, to really...emphasise this campaign.

So, I work with various committees...I work with the education committee. I also work with two postgraduate committees - Postgraduate Research and Postgraduate Talk. And I also work with Union Links; Union Links are paid by us to work for the union to go into individual departments.

So, for example, if I said 'guys, could you find out how your department does assessment and feedback', they'd go out, two weeks later they'd bring me back their ideas on feedback, they'd ask their course reps about feedback, so they're an invaluable system to work with.

Course reps...I've also reviewed faculty representatives this year, so I'm working with all these students to get their opinions on personal tutors. But to also emphasise the importance of the QAA Institutional audit and the kind of things that it's saying. And like I said at the bottom, the larger your network, the stronger your campaign.

So, some of the tips that you can do...one thing I did was send out a newsletter to the representatives at the start of the year; inform them about the QAA audit; say what it is about; say how you're using it in your campaigns, because QAA Institutional audit doesn't really mean anything to students unless you are telling them how you're utilising it properly.

Another thing that's really, really important is making sure that the...work of the QAA audit is put into all your handbooks for your student representatives. So that can be even representatives that are not really involved with stuff like that, just getting the message of what the Institutional audit's about. So one of the things I did was designed, for example, Union Council; put in my work, what I've been doing with Institutional audit, course rep handbook, Union Link handbook etc, so that's a really important part post-audit.

But I think you can build on it a bit more than that. I mean, what we've done this year is run student workshops on the QAA audit and campaigns, and what their thoughts are on your campaigns. So this year - Aaron attended this...early in the year - was the course rep conference. We had different sessions and I ran one on personal tutors and in that session again I was emphasising the importance of what the audit says: there's been no change in provision from 2003 to 2007, how do you feel about that? And it did really strike a chord with some students...that this report was saying that there had been no substantial change.

So this year, me and the student representation coordinator organised this and it was a really good opportunity to kind of get feedback on where you are going with your campaign and also ask them how they felt personal tutoring was going in their department as well.

So, yet another really important part is utilising your student media. I mean, we've all got marketing departments or marketing means in our unions and I think that's a really important part of getting the message about the QAA out there...and getting student feedback. So, what I've been doing - beautiful pictures of myself - I have a blog on the union website, again I've used that time and time again to say what the audit is, how I'm working on it etc.

I wrote articles for the newspaper on my campaign about personal tutors, I ran a 'rate my personal tutor' campaign, kind of based on an 'I love my personal tutor' campaign that we did last year. And what we did, we had report cards for students: you could either rate your tutor A, B, C, D, E or fail [laugh], and you could write comments about your tutors, so even if you weren't seeing them, you could say: 'as a change, I want this to change, I don’t see mine, I want to see mine more', because when we ran the 'I love my personal tutor campaign' last year we were getting some really good examples of best practice, but we weren't getting what students essentially wanted changing about the personal tutorial system and that's what we wanted to do this year.

So I've done quite a few video blogs: this is what's happened...this is what my campaign's about etc. Rewarding best practice as well, we gave prizes to the personal tutors that were outstanding and we gave a prize to students who had come up with the best solution to the personal tutorial system.

So again...it's establishing relationships with people in the institution to ensure that the recommendations are listened to, your opinions are listened to, and your campaigns can really get off the ground. So, heads of departments: are they aware of the comments in the QAA Institutional audit, if so are they acting upon them? Your Pro Vice-Chancellor for Learning and Teaching: work with the Pro Vice-Chancellor, jointly release statements about the campaign which is what I have done with my Pro Vice-Chancellor. He's very, very pro-active - Aaron will know - I'm quite fortunate in that sense. I've done a video with him as well about the audit [laugh]...it's not online yet, but it's quite interesting and it's to show that there is a joint partnership between the University and the union on campaigning for this to change.

Learning and teaching services: are they working currently on the university's response to the QAA recommendations? If there are, how are they filtering your opinion in that? Are there students on there? Can you get students on there? Do students want to be on there etc?

The staff who are responsible for NSS and SSS surveys: I've been working with them, they can really go through the data with you. I mean the NSS is a huge compilation of data, and our SSS is a huge compilation of data as well, so they were absolutely invaluable sitting down going through it with me and saying 'right, if you want to see this perspective of the institution, here's how to do it, we'll break it down, show you the variables etc', so their support was really good.

This is quite an interesting one and I think it's kind of specific to my institution really. Faculty pro vice-chancellors: we've currently had a university structure shift where instead of deans of faculties, we've now got faculty pro vice-chancellors, so in each individual faculty these faculty pro vice-chancellors are really autonomous over the faculty. It used to be in a central Learning and Teaching Committee, but now their teaching agenda is set within the faculties. So that gives us an opportunity to go to each faculty pro vice-chancellor for the five faculties and say 'what are we doing about this audit? what's personal tutoring like?

And so this year I've worked to establish a relationship with each of those and organise a meeting...how we can take the campaigns in the faculties forward. And if you have...the equivalent of a faculty dean, they are actually really good people to talk to about how things are working in their faculty.

Relay the work you've done back to your students - that's so important. You know, they...form the core of the student written submission and the audit process, but you must feed back to them because I think that's how students say 'yep, that's worked for me'.

So, one of the ways I've done this is again the rate my personal tutor campaign; I had a stall where students were given a report card, asked what they would like changing. And if students came up to the stall, we would tell them about the audit and how this was based on the outcomes of the audit.

We also had 'naked man' [laugh]...which the vice-chancellor...this was like one of the best results of the campaign...the vice-chancellor has asked for all the material and promotion to be featured to his heads of department talk. Which is really good...because that's the university saying we want to know about it. And the new vice-chancellor at our university is really pro-active with stuff like that, and he likes the fact that we've kind of said 'yeah some personal tutors are good, but what do you want changing; what can you see could be better about the system etc?' So what we did is we had a blank canvas, a naked man, and we asked students to write on there what they wanted changing etc and why they thought personal tutoring was really important to them.

And again...I've interviewed the personal tutors who won the competition etc; newspaper covered the story and were actually really interested in...where I'd based the campaign from, the Institutional audit 2003, 2007, and they...quoted from the audit in the newspaper so students could actually see why I had done a campaign like this.

It might seem a million miles away but it comes around really fast, it's handover. At the moment I've done a handover pack for my successor, and a large part of that has been formed on what I have done with the audit. How the audit works - even if they're not in a student written submission, if they're not going to see an audit at their institution, make sure you even write that in because they could be handing over to someone, who hands over to someone who does do an Institutional audit. So I think that's a really important part.

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