Improving our student experiences
08 Oct 2024
A joint message from Fiona Smyth, Faculty Vice-Dean for Teaching, Learning and Students, and Katie Jackson, Students’ Union Faculty of Humanities Officer
Dear all,
We’re delighted to have welcomed our students to campus for the new academic year and it’s fantastic to feel the buzz as they start or return to their studies and enjoy what our University, Students’ Union and the city have to offer.
We want to make this year as positive an experience as possible for all our students. Wherever we work in the Faculty of Humanities, we all have a part to play in supporting our students so they can make the most of their time with us and develop the skills, knowledge and confidence to seize the opportunities available to them when they leave us.
One important way in which we receive valuable feedback from our students on their time with us is the National Student Survey (NSS). As a nationwide survey of final-year undergraduates at UK higher education institutions, it’s a key benchmark for how our student experience stacks up as a University, a Faculty and in our Schools down to programme level.
Our 2024 NSS results were very disappointing. The University as a whole was placed 146th out of 155 institutions, and 23rd out of 24 Russell Group universities. As a university, we scored poorly across all seven themes in the questions.
We have some excellent work taking place in our Schools which is reflected in a number of good NSS positivity scores at Faculty, School and programme level. At a Faculty level, our students were most positive about academic support, an 84.3% score representing a 1.7% increase on last year. Teaching on my course also scored well with 83.9%, up 1%.
However, assessment and feedback and student voice continue to be the themes of most concern at School-level in the Faculty and throughout the University. Our Faculty positivity score of 67.8% for assessment and feedback was a 1.8% fall from last year and, while our student voice score increased by 2.1% compared to 2023, the 66.6% result needs to be much better.
We recognise the great work colleagues in many departments are doing, but we need to perform well consistently throughout all our programmes. The student comments from the NSS tell us that in some cases students don’t always know when feedback will be released, occasionally feedback is late and sometimes they don’t know about this in advance. Most colleagues provide marking criteria in advance but we must make sure that we are all doing that and we need to make it easy for students to find on our Blackboard pages. The NSS comments tell us that students feel like they give us feedback but then they don’t know what has improved as a result.
Whether it’s the clarity of marking criteria and receiving assessment feedback on time, to giving our students the right opportunities to give their views on their course and valuing their constructive criticism, all the elements which come together under the two themes of assessment and feedback and student voice are very important to our students and we need to make sure we identify where changes can be made and tell our students what we are doing to improve their experience. The Faculty and Students’ Union should work closely together on developing the student representatives structure and other key areas as part of improving student voice.
President and Vice-Chancellor Duncan Ivison and the University senior leadership team (SLT) rightly see enhancing our students’ experience as one of our most important strategic objectives. Hopefully you’ve had the opportunity to read Fiona Devine’s latest message in last Friday’s issue of Humanities eNews. In it she reiterates the continuing importance of all colleagues doing as much as they can to improve our students’ experience during their time with us, and of us carefully considering all the feedback we receive from students and acting on it to support their learning and wider University experience.
Taking the 2024 NSS results as a basis, and specifically targeting assessment and feedback and student voice for this academic year, University Vice-President for Teaching Learning and Students, April McMahon, and her team have produced a 15-point action plan to address the core issues affecting these themes to make fundamental improvements by the end of January 2025.
Working with Schools, the Faculty has now developed a more detailed plan of actions sitting below the central plan, and SLT will be reviewing our progress from now until January. The Faculty plan largely focuses on existing policies and practices, so it is not a lot of additional work but ensuring that the work being done is better and more consistent across our Schools and programmes.
Heads of School, Heads of Department, Directors of Teaching and Learning or Programme Directors will share more information on the Faculty action plan with colleagues this week.
While the NSS is a survey of our final-year undergraduate students, assessment and feedback and student voice are equally important for all our students, whether undergraduate or postgraduate. . We should take collective responsibility for improving the experience of our students from joining us through to graduation and continue to work together to make a difference.
Best wishes,
Fiona and Katie