Principles

General principles of the University’s provision of personal tutoring and development:

  1. All students on taught courses will have a named Personal Tutor at the commencement of their studies and the University will endeavour to ensure that they retain this Personal Tutor for the duration of their course.

  2. Personal Tutors will normally be a member of academic staff from within the same course or subject discipline as the tutee.

  3. Personal Tutors will meet students as soon as possible at the beginning of their studies. Personal Tutors will meet students in a variety of ways, face-to-face or virtually, including a mix of individual and group sessions which should be timetabled or linked to a credit-bearing module. Personal Tutors should also respond to reasonable student-initiated requests to meet privately.

Underpinning expectations:

    1. Students will be expected to prepare for and attend all timetabled and scheduled personal tutoring and development sessions.

    2. A change of Personal Tutor can be arranged, if required by either the student or Personal Tutor.

    3. The work of Personal Tutors will be recognised in workload planning and is viewed as having parity of esteem with other academic roles.

    4. Each School/Department shall have a Senior Tutor appointed by the Head of School/Department to oversee the specific structure, content, operation, and effectiveness of personal tutoring and development, and promote or arrange staff training opportunities at School/Department level. Training and development will be provided (see section 6).

    5. Associate Deans (Students) will be responsible for overall monitoring and review of the operation of personal tutoring and development within their Faculties.

    6. The function of the personal tutoring and development system in Faculties will be reported annually to the Student Experience Committee by the Associate Deans (Students) using data from internal student voice mechanisms. Personal tutoring and development will be reviewed at School/Department/Subject Group-level under the University’s academic provision review process using internal student voice mechanism data.

    7. Students will be expected to voice views and opinions related to personal tutoring and development via student voice mechanisms such as Student Voice Committees and Faculty Student Forum.