Message from Fiona Smyth, Vice-Dean for Teaching, Learning and Students
20 Sep 2024
This week Fiona enjoys welcoming our new and returning students, reflects on the intensive preparations for the start of the new academic year and focuses on the NSS as one of our key priorities.
Seeing our students arrive on campus after the summer is for me one of the most enjoyable times of the academic year. As we reach the end of Welcome Week, it is wonderful to see our new students taking the first steps of their journey with us, getting to know our campus, finding out more about their chosen programme of study, discovering the huge range of societies, clubs and activities available, and hopefully starting to make friendships. I am always inspired by the buzz our new and returning students bring to the University at the start of the year, and I am looking forward to welcoming and working with them.
A huge amount of work by colleagues across our Schools, Faculty and the University as a whole goes into making the start of the academic year run as smoothly as possible. Several new and improved systems have been or are being introduced to increase operational effectiveness and there’s an even greater focus on improving the experience of our students and promoting staff wellbeing.
As many of you may know, the University has created a Start of Year Hub on StaffNet to help make it as easy as possible for all colleagues to find the key information they may need for the 2024/25 academic year and details of how to escalate any issues.
It is broken down into several components. These include an ‘Operational areas’ section, which gives details of the actions being taken to support progression of returning students, attendance and engagement monitoring, student queries, staffing, timetabling and registration. A separate section covers the main support system changes taking place, such as Connect, the new IT support portal; SEAtS, the new student attendance and engagement system; a new version of MyManchester for students, and more.
And the ‘Key contacts’ area gives the escalation process for issues, explaining that School teams are the first point of contact. If you’re unsure who to contact, in the first instance you can get in touch with your Head of Teaching, Learning & Student Experience, Teaching and Learning Manager, or Student Service, Support & Development Manager.
Thank you to everyone involved in making improvements for the start of the academic year and for all your continued work and support as we move into the first semester.
Supporting our students and making their time with us as rewarding, enjoyable and successful as possible is one of the main drivers of much of the work encapsulated in the Start of Year Hub, and improving student experience is one of the University’s most important priorities for this year. Since becoming our new President and Vice-Chancellor, Duncan Ivison has made it clear that this will be a crucial focus.
The National Student Survey (NSS) completed by our final year undergraduate students each year is perhaps the most useful and easily accessible way in which we can measure how we’re performing when it comes to student experience. While the University, our Faculty and our Schools have been making progress in improving positivity scores for a number of the key themes addressed by the NSS, assessment and feedback and student voice in particular are two themes which have proved more challenging and where we need to make more progress.
Whether you are an academic or a professional services colleague, doing the best for our students is the responsibility of us all. And by looking at how we can improve in all the areas which impact on our students’ time at Manchester, and then making the necessary changes, we can create the best possible environment for our students. This would then hopefully be reflected in our NSS results for 2024/25 and in future years as we maintain a culture of continuous improvement.
We know that colleagues are very busy and we are not asking you to do more, but to look at how we can do things better. We will be sharing an NSS action plan with programme teams in the coming days. During the year, we will send updates on progress with our targeted improvements, and we will be asking for the help of academic colleagues and other staff who have contact with our students in promoting the NSS when it goes live early in 2025.
Across our Faculty and within our Schools we have much to be proud of and much to look forward to. Let’s build on our strengths and use the energy of our new and returning students as a spur for what will be an exciting year ahead.
Best wishes,
Fiona