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Winner: Manchester Metropolitan University
Project: Third Term Programme
While employers value the knowledge and skills a degree confers, students often secure jobs through experiences and contacts outside the curriculum.
But not all students have equal access to these opportunities. To address this problem and broaden the skill sets of its graduates, Manchester Metropolitan University came up with the Third Term Programme.
The programme offers students a way to develop a personal interest or skill – or learn a new one – outside the restrictions of their course, then to reflect on their learning and gain credits that could count towards their final degree. Bursaries and support packages are available for those who would otherwise find it difficult to take part.
Students are able to apply for a range of activities put together by the university, from work placements and volunteering to learning a language or coding skills, travelling abroad, campaigning for environmental change or taking part in a team project. They can also organise their own activities, in consultation with lecturers.
The experiences mainly take place over an intensive month at the end of the academic year. Students then have the summer to reflect on what they have learned and put together a portfolio demonstrating it, which can be in the form of a written essay, video, cartoon or mixture of different media.
The idea is to produce something that will interest employers, while also gaining academic credits that can count towards the next academic year.
The university has rewritten its regulations to incorporate the third term offer into all course designs and allow the best credits from optional units to contribute to degree classification.
Students can build up more credit than they need to encourage them to take risks and learn from failure, particularly if they are balancing study with other demands.
The university has allocated £2.4 million over four years to develop the programme and to use it to focus on narrowing gaps in achievement and employment.
So far, 700 students have taken part, with students fromblack, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, those who are first in their family to go to university, commuting and disabled students particularly targeted and well represented.
The programme has helped students develop contacts with local employers and allowed the university to respond swiftly to local employer needs. It has also boosted students’ marks, enabled them to make a positive impact on their communities and encouraged them to feel they belong.
It is now to be expanded across all undergraduate courses to cover 1,500 students in 2020 and 3,000 in 2021.
Runner up: Coventry University
Project: Coventry University and the Greenwich School of Management
In July 2019, one of the biggest private higher education providers in England announced it had gone into administration.
Greenwich School of Management said it had been unable to recruit and retain enough students and that all tuition, classes and exams would stop the following September.
This left its 3,500 students stranded. Most faced losing the academic credits they had built up over the time they had spent at GSM.
Coventry University, which has offshoots in Dagenham, East London, about half an hour from Greenwich, and in the City of London, stepped in to help.
At the beginning of August, with just seven weeks to go before the start of the next academic year, a task force was set up to work out how to support as many students as possible to continue with their studies.
It set up a dedicated hotline and call centre, with recruitment, admissions and student engagement staff available to answer questions, while recruitment teams were stationed at GSM to speak to students face-to-face and gain an understanding of the profile of the student body and what its concerns were.
Meanwhile, conscious that the distance between Greenwich and Dagenham could pose problems for some students, it explored the option of using premises in Greenwich.
It managed to secure a lease within the previous GSM building, which meant that from November students would be able to continue their studies in the place they had previously attended, now called CU London Greenwich Campus.
As a result of finding out the students’ needs, Coventry was able to put together a tailored solution to the uncertainty they were facing.
This included credit recognition for the studies they had completed so far, one year bursaries to keep the lower tuition fees they had been paying at GSM, and the possibility of starting their courses at six possible points in the year, without fear of being behind in their studies.
This meant that while many students were able to start at the Coventry’s Dagenham campus in September, those who started at the new Greenwich campus in November were not disadvantaged.
Modules were offered one at a time, to allow early interventions if students were struggling, and study times were flexible enough to allow students to combine study with work.
As a result, around 1,600 students have been able to continue with their studies and have received support through the stressful experience of institutional collapse.
Runner up: Kingston University
Project: Bridging the attainment gap and improving progression of BAME students
Kingston University attracts a high percentage of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) students, including many who study pharmacy.
But the university noticed degree outcomes in its BSc pharmaceutical course not only followed the national pattern of low BAME attainment compared to other ethnic groups but were low compared to undergraduate pharmaceutical courses offered elsewhere.
One problem was that the BSc recruited many students who had originally applied to take the MPharm but who had failed to achieve the necessary grades.
The BSc is an alternative route into the MPharm but not all BSc students manage to progress from one to the other because they need an average first year mark of 70%.
This meant that many students were going into the second year of their BSc disappointed to be there and with little idea of what they would be qualified to do once they had graduated.
The university decided to tackle the problem on different fronts. First, it used social media to contact pharmaceutical science alumni working in relevant jobs and used them to lead sessions on employability. It also built up case histories of successful alumni, helped by funding from the Royal Society of Chemistry. This gave students access to diverse, relatable role models.
Then, it introduced mentoring of first-year students by second years – first in an academic skills module and then in more general science modules.
It also secured external validation of the course from industry bodies, which gave students information, resources and networking opportunities as well as industry recognition.
An industrial liaison group formalised links between the teaching team and industry, enabling employers to inform curriculum development.
Academic staff also received training in unconscious bias, equality, diversity and inclusivity.
The most striking result was the removal of BAME and other attainment gaps in the BSc. Scores in the National Student Survey also improved significantly.
Students who were mentored in academic skills had better progression rates to the second year of the degree than those who were not, despite having lower average entry tariffs.
And students showed their appreciation by awarding an unusually high number of student-led teaching awards to BSc staff.
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