Working together to address your priorities
Delivering effective change
A holistic approach to student success may be achieved by addressing a combination of the strategic priorities outlined below in an integrated programme of activity:
Embedding Employability
How you help to prepare graduates for life beyond university is something at the forefront of multiple stakeholders’ minds. Effectively embedding employability both in the curriculum and within your extra-curricular provision is key.
Transforming Assessment
Assessment and feedback impacts on staff time, university reputations, league tables and, most important of all, students’ future lives. It is at the heart of many challenges faced by higher education providers today.
Student Retention and Success
Retention and attainment involves inclusion, ensuring the full and equitable participation in and progression through HE for all students.
Enterprise and Entrepreneurship in Higher Education
Enterprise and entrepreneurship education can add value to the learner’s journey, whether they are interested in starting their own venture or being enterprising when working for someone else in the private, public or voluntary and community sector.
Flexible Learning
Flexible learning is about empowering students by offering them choices in how, what, when and where they learn: the pace, place and mode of delivery.
Internationalising higher education
Promoting a high quality, equitable and global learning experience can help prepare graduates to live in and contribute responsibly to a globally interconnected society.
Student engagement through partnership
At its heart, true partnership is about applying well-evidenced and effective approaches to learning, teaching and assessment with a commitment to open, constructive and continuous dialogue with our student communities.
Education for sustainable development
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is an interdisciplinary approach to learning that covers the integrated social, economic and environmental dimensions of the formal and informal curriculum.
Technology enhanced learning
The use of technology to maximise the student learning experience is a vibrant area of interest across all tiers of global education.
Mental wellbeing in higher education
Institutions should strive to maintain the optimum wellbeing of its staff and student population by providing the appropriate tools and support to allow them to engage productively with the learning experience.
Tailoring your priorities across specific disciplines
Whether you're working with us across a range of disciplines or within a specific disciplinary area (Arts and Humanities, Health and Social Care, Social Sciences, STEM), we will shape our services to meet your needs, supporting you at an individual, departmental, faculty or institutional level.
Student Success Frameworks Series
Best practice frameworks, informed by research, developed with the sector for the sector
The issues impacting on student success are broad and complex, having a shared point of reference and common language to discuss, shape and review policy, process and practice can therefore be an extremely effective way of applying a consistent methodology to leading change. Engaging with our research informed frameworks in combination, will help identify smarter ways of working. This is achieved through identifying synergies between key strategic priorities that all underpin teaching excellence and the aspiration to support student success in its broadest sense.
“The Advance HE [formerly the Higher Education Academy] frameworks are evidence-based and provide the higher education sector with a national reference point to enable the institution to develop its own approach according to local circumstances as well as benchmarking performance.” Universities UK (2016), p.73, Working in partnership: enabling social mobility.
Consultancy and Enhancement Services
Your challenges are our priorities and as we’re independent of any regulatory framework, we can provide an external viewpoint and be your critical friend. We create ‘safe places’, facilitating collaboration and candid conversation between and within institutions. Our support includes:
- expert advice and guidance
- bespoke sustainable consultancy solutions from department through to institutional level
- staff development opportunities at all levels
- teaching resources
- events and networks
- examples of sector best practice
Introducing the Professional Standards Framework 2023 (PSF 2023)
Launched in 2006 and last revised in 2011, the Professional Standards Framework for teaching and supporting learning in higher education (PSF) has global recognition for raising the profile of teaching and learning in higher education. The PSF’s contribution to reward and recognition is unsurpassed, being used by individuals, institutions and national bodies.
Following a sector and evidence led review, the PSF 2023 is a more inclusive Framework that recognises the critical role of the context in which practice takes place and is more accessible to all professionals with a role in teaching and supporting learning.
Its focus on effectiveness and impact of practice drives attention to improved outcomes for learners across the global community. The concise, streamlined approach offers clarity and ease of use in professional development, leadership of teaching and learning, strategic enhancement and in fellowship and accreditation settings.
We will be opening applications for fellowship for each of the four categories supported by the PSF 2023 on 3 April 2023, new guidance documents and templates are available in an information pack on each of the category of fellowship web pages.
We will continue to welcome applications made against PSF 2011 until 31 December 2023 for individuals already in the process of developing their application. If you would like to apply under UKPSF 2011 please visit UKPSF 2011 fellowship application resources.
ChangeBusters
The innovative ‘ChangeBusters’ game, designed by the team from Sheffield Hallam University, constructs a ‘Theory of Change’ based on evidence from within the ARAP integrative literature review. This game aims to support users to understand the stages of a Theory of Change, build confidence, explore evaluative questions, and extend learning through application to their own context. The goal is better intervention design and evaluation, which in turn should lead to better student outcomes.
