UKAT offers conferences, webinars and other events throughout the year, both online and in various locations around the UK. These events provide professional development opportunities for personal tutors and academic advisors who are invested in helping students achieve academic success.
The UKAT Annual Conference is the major event of the year and provides an opportunity to learn in general sessions from experts in the field, gain knowledge and review best practices with colleagues in concurrent sessions, and participate in interactive workshops. The variety of learning formats also may include poster sessions, exhibitor presentations, and formal and informal networking opportunities.
Monday 8 April 2024, 08:00 - Tuesday 9 April 2024, 15:30
University of Greenwich, London, UK
Our students need good personal tutors and advisors like never before in these challenging economic and social times. We therefore want this to be a radical and constructive conference in setting a vision for the future of personal tutoring that will place it at the heart of student success strategies in UK Higher Education.
The overarching theme for the conference is Personal Tutoring in the Spotlight. Contributions are being invited that will speak to our specific ‘spotlight’ themes:
1) Spotlight on… Student voices. Contributions produced by and/or with students who can share their perspectives on and views of personal tutoring and advising, what they value, and what they need.
2) Spotlight on… Collaboration. Contributions considering personal tutoring and advising as a collaborative practice between academic and professional services colleagues, for example focusing on professional boundaries, policies and systems, and case studies of transformative collaborations.
3) Spotlight on... Student core skills. Contributions reflecting on how personal advising and tutoring can shape and develop students’ core academic. professional, and personal skills, and in doing so address study skills and awarding gap issues.
4) Spotlight on… Professional development. Contributions thinking about how we can better prepare academics and professional services staff to be the best tutors and advisors they can be, whether through in-house training programmes or other institutional or grass-roots schemes.
5) Spotlight on… Advocacy. Contributions demonstrating how individuals, teams, departments, or institutions have advocated or might advocate for the centrality of personal tutoring within UKHE, for example through innovative policies, embedding tutoring into recruitment procedures, cutting-edge scholarship and digital materials, or any other ways in which personal tutoring and advising is advocated for on the local, national, or international stage.
Thursday 18 April 2024, 14:00 - Thursday 18 April 2024, 15:30
Online
Dr Andrea Todd, University of Chester
In this webinar we will consider the findings of a national research project involving 41 student-parents from 14 UK HEIs. The findings reveal that we (institutions, access and participation teams, departments and individual academics) must do better for our student-parents, who - whilst not currently included in the OfS Equality of Opportunity Risk Register - are at risk of failure due to lack of academic and pastoral support. The session will share with members two research-informed, evidence-based toolkits aimed at empowering student-parents to take control of their university journey and giving personal tutors the tools to support student-parents to succeed.
Thursday 16 May 2024, 14:00 - Thursday 16 May 2024, 15:30
Online
Jean Assender, University of Birmingham; Melissa Jacobi, Sheffield Hallam University
The UKAT Student Engagement Special Interest Group (SE SIG), led by Jean Assender, University of Birmingham and Melissa Jacobi, Sheffield Hallam University; are running a cross institutional, collaborative research project to explore barriers to student engagement with Academic Advising/Personal tutoring.
It has long been suggested that understanding how students experience their time at university is vital in terms of ensuring we can tailor provision to meet the needs of diverse student populations rather than homogenising our understanding and potentially alienating groups of students (Sabri, 2011). This concept is taken further by Hews et al (2022) who identified that it is necessary to consider how students interact with the broader systems and processes at an institution, and how this affects how they derive value from their higher education experience.
The project is therefore using Listening Rooms methodology- whereby friendship pairs undertake ‘recorded, private, guided conversations without a researcher present’ (Heron, 2020, p393) around a series of 6 flash cards that the SE SIG developed around themes such as student awareness of Personal Tutoring/ Academic Advising, barriers to student engagement and what might a good tutoring/ advising experience look like?
By listening to the voices of our students we will be able to identify and rectify institution specific barriers, as well as identifying themes that resonate across institutions. This could support further research into ways to overcome these challenges and we hope support the ongoing development of our advising/tutoring offer, as well as adding to sector knowledge about barriers to engagement.
So far students from the University of Birmingham, Sheffield Hallam University and Manchester Metropolitan University who self-identified as not engaging well with their Academic Adviser/Personal Tutor have participated in a Listening Rooms conversation and the webinar will provide further details of the project and outline our interim findings.
Learning Outcomes
Tuesday 11 June 2024 - Wednesday 12 June 2024
Abertay University, Dundee
The European Access Network (EAN) conference 2024 has now opened its call for papers. Scotland will welcome the first EAN conference since the pandemic with an event entitled 'New Beginnings for European Access - Designing Equity, Transitions and Student Success'. Dundee will be the host city and we invite proposals for talks, workshops and posters for this engaging and welcoming international conference that will run from 11-12 June at Abertay University.
The conference asks you to share your practice and/or research excellence across one or more of theses themes:
Preparation - how we prepare, set expectations, support and enable our students to successfully transition through well designed processes.
Diversity - how we reach out to and enable students from all backgrounds to progress to and succeed in tertiary education.
Partnerships - how schools, colleges, universities and other agencies and organisations are working together to support student and institutional success.
We hope to welcome talks from schools, colleges, charities and universities who are innovating and learning from their work in the access space as we all strive to enable student success. We really look forward to reading your proposals and to welcoming you to the sunniest city in Scotland - Sunshine is guaranteed!
Events in italic typeface are not provided by UKAT but are 3rd party events which may be of interest to UKAT members