At the start of academic year 22/23 the Teaching and Learning Committee introduced new operating guidelines for supporting student engagement and using the Student Engagement Dashboard.

As a reminder, the Student Engagement Dashboard is a tool to support student wellbeing, for which engagement is a key indicator.

It allows us to identify when students’ participation in learning has dropped or is at a level that may cause concern about their progress and wellbeing. It therefore supports retention and success, as well as enabling the university to meet UK Visa and Immigration sponsor requirements.    

All staff should now be familiar with the agreed operating guidelines for engagement and the key headlines:

• All academic units must use the Student Engagement Dashboard.   
• The university baseline for an intervention is two weeks of zero engagement without an appropriate documented reason.  
• Within each academic unit, senior tutors are the academic leads for the dashboard, with heads of school responsible for ensuring roles are appropriately resourced.  
• All schools must use the official university QR code system for capturing attendance at in-person teaching sessions with schools giving students opportunity to achieve a minimum of two scans per week. 

The Student Engagement Dashboard now includes a ‘Personal Tutor View’ and functionality to enable relevant staff to record contact and interventions with students. It is important that interactions with students are recorded to ensure other teams are aware of the latest developments, enabling our activity to be joined up. Staff training on these new elements was delivered in October 2022.    

Pastoral process

The operating guidelines detail a step-by-step intervention process for contacting a disengaged student. They describe the process flow for contact – broken into the ‘Academic Unit stage’ and the ‘Support and Wellbeing stage’. Timescales have been included to ensure that we are responding in a timely manner to a student who has disengaged from their study.  

To support academic units in contacting students where initial attempts are not successful, a new Student Engagement Dashboard Manager has been appointed in the Student and Campus Life team. Contact details are available in the operating guidelines linked above. 

Permitted periods of approved absence

The Quality Manual states that a permitted period of absence should not normally exceed 2 weeks and that where absences exceed permitted periods, the school may require the student to interrupt their studies and return at a specified time in the future that will enable the student to resume the programme appropriately.

Please remind students that they are required to attend and academically engage for the full duration of teaching during term-time and that for masters students, term-time includes the summer dissertation period.

QR code scan data indicates that rates of in-person attendance decreases in the weeks prior to university vacation periods. For students in the UK on student visas, it is an expectation of UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) that students are attending and engaging with their studies in the UK throughout the term-time period applicable to that particular course.