Development Monthly | #36 October 2024 | Mind & Matter: Nurturing Wellbeing & Mental Health in HE

As a new academic year is underway, we in the Student Experience and Engagement (SEE) SIG have been asking ourselves what success looks like for the coming year. Our Celebrating Member Success blog, curated by SIG Deputy Coordinator Nissy Cheema, will include a new feature for 2025 bringing together members’ views on what success in the SEE space means, and will undoubtedly help us to better understand that success means a multitude of different things to different people.

It’s not just a new academic year; October is the month of Rosh Hashanah, the start of a new civil year in the Jewish tradition, and a time of both reflection and looking forwards to a ‘sweet’ year ahead, symbolised by the eating of apples dipped in honey. In the tradition of all New Year celebrations therefore, the SEE SIG is looking ahead to the next 12 months, including our thoughts on key issues in the HE landscape and a range of opportunities that members can get involved with in the coming year.

Widening Participation… inflating grades?

At a time when many institutions are submitting their Access & Participation Plans for approval in readiness for Academic Year 2025/26, the OfS’ concerns that a large number of Firsts awarded remain ‘unexplained’ may seem particularly ill-timed. Upon closer inspection the story is, of course, more nuanced; in 13.4% of cases, the OfS’ statistical model cannot explain why students with lower entry grades have achieved a First.

The Secondary Education sector has long relied on statistical modelling to track students’ likely attainment, not least through the controversial Attainment 8 and Progress 8 measures which calculate students’ GCSE performance across 8 DfE approved subjects, and then compare these with the results of students with similar prior attainment across the country in order to measure a school’s effectiveness. Whilst ‘grade inflation’ is regularly discussed in the Secondary Ed context, how many times have you heard a Headteacher, teacher, parent, governor or even the DfE call an individual student’s success in overcoming this statistical prediction ‘unexplained’?

Greater public confidence in the rigour of GCSE results may be, at least in part, due to the robust (if not infallible) system of external examining bodies and a nation-wide blind marking system for a high percentage of the assessment for each GCSE qualification, and a comprehensive remarking process for disputed results. Conversely, universities continue to rely on the so-called ‘chumocracy’ of the External Examiner system, and calls to reform this are far from new. After all, how can we know what real success looks like when our mates are marking our homework?

The SEE SIG’s hope for a sweet new year… (Without wanting to tread on the toes of the Quality and Standards SIG!) We welcome more robust regulation in the interest of guarding standards for students, whilst also remaining hopeful that public discourse won’t veer towards belittling the successes of deserving and hardworking students who achieve degrees of all classifications.

The Student Survey Acronym Salad

With Welcome Week behind us, for many of us working in Student Engagement our attention now turns to the joys of NSSUKESPTESPRES.

NSS – National Student Survey
UKES – UK Experience Survey
PTES – Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey
PRES – Postgraduate Research Experience Survey

NSS is a key measure of success for all registered universities, whether we choose to admit it or not; not only do NSS metrics feed into all of the major league tables and the TEF, participation is a regulatory requirement, and students with opinions will express them – we ignore them at our peril!

NSS 2025 is a key year as it will be the third round using a new question bank and four-point response scale methodology, enabling us to undertake better trends analyses than a basic ‘improvements since last year’ measure.

Before we get to the results, though, the hot topic in the SEE SIG is always how to maximise response rates, and this will undoubtedly be one of a number of conversations at our bi-monthly Coffee Break Catch-Ups – organised by SIG Deputy Coordinator Siobhán Dumphy – in the lead up to NSS launch in January.

The SEE SIG’s hope for a sweet new year… (Apologies for the self promotion!)
An awesome turn out at our Coffee Break Catch-Up on Thursday 12 December which will be completely NSS focussed. Come along, share your best practice, and reap the wisdom of a thriving network!

Professional Development in Student Experience & Engagement

Talking of sharing best practice, this – as a strong form of sustainable professional development – is one of our biggest foci as a SIG. Our Student Experience Events and Conferences blog – curated by SIG Deputy Coordinator Chris Whitehead – shares a range of events and conferences related to student experience that are taking place throughout the year, while our Action Learning Triads scheme – launched this year by none other than the author of this post, SIG Deputy Coordinator Bob McKay – enables colleagues working in similar fields in institutions around the world to collaborate in order to solve a common problem or issue, sharing experience and insights along the way; if you want to find out how this has gone, come along to the AHEP Annual Conference and Exhibition 2025 in Glasgow where we hope to be talking about this first iteration of the Action Learning Triad scheme and even bringing some participants along to share their work (applications for the next cohort aren’t open yet so watch this space and look our for future announcements).

An embodiment of best practice sharing can be found in SIG Coordinator David Gilani; a cursory glance at his LinkedIn will show you just how prolific he is in this field. This year, David has been working on finalising his PhD exploring the link between students’ belonging needs and outcomes, and we can’t wait to get our hands on a copy! (Congratulations from us all, David, and good luck for your Viva!)

The SEE SIG’s hope for a sweet new year… A year characterised by a real spirit of collaboration, where colleagues are afforded the time and space to be able to come together meaningfully and share impactful best practice that improves the experiences of all our students. Also a year where David publishes a monograph on agentic belonging that we can all use as a handbook for our work in this area!

One of us! One of us! The astute among you will have clocked this article for a thinly veiled attempt to advertise our (let’s be fair, amazing) SIG. And it is. So why not join us?! All you need to do is fill out the ‘Become a SIG Member’ box on our SEE SIG page. SEE you at one of our events soon!

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