Student Life

To view the complete introduction talk, click here.

Welcome to the Directorate of Student Life. Student Life represents a grouping of distinct student support remits who all share a common ethos and desire: to see our students thrive. 

To find out more about the support remits within Student Life, and importantly how to access them, take a look within the icons below:

Our Vision for Student Life

Students as Collaborators – We want to ensure we create as many opportunities for students to work alongside us as true co-producers and co-investors, knowledge builders and users. 

Redefining the Narrative - we have to achieve a span of reactionary support provision, alongside anticipatory presence and offer for the majority of our student body.  We also have to consider strength-based models which do not lend as heavily on a deficit model. This will also consider a Mental Health and Wellness Continuum

Cultural Competency, Compassion and Safety – We will ensure we better explore and ensure provision that is culturally competent - we have increased the diversity within our teams but want to go further. Our aims for compassion and safety will also look to embed this across the whole university, supporting the training and support needs of staff. With Safeguarding alignment sitting in this area also, this will ensure this is embedded and part of our business-as-usual approach, students need to feel that they belong but they also need to feel safe.

Meeting and Supporting our Students and Stakeholders where they are. With the new city campus library refurbishment and the opening of our Student Life Space - we are bringing our services front and centre, in the hope to increase accessibility. With our increased capacity and capability, we hope to continue to build on our engagement and the uptake of our support by going to where students are. 

Embedded Interdisciplinary Evaluation Culture and Knowledge Mobilization – We aim to build a research and innovation infrastructure, connecting people, ideas, and research. Work is already underway to work with each strand to develop their own theory of change model so that they can conceive KPI’s and consider their vast data sources and the evaluation of them. We are designing and planning to launch a “Student Perception of Care Survey” in 2025 and looking to embed into other data collection points such as Individual Learner Profile’s and admissions. We also want to create student opportunity within this strand to consider driving authentic student engagement, which we also hope can be used to inform wider knowledge exchange within this remit in the wider sector given it is so scarce.

Strength through Partnership – As well as our own internal stakeholder partnerships, we must zoom out more and connect the multiple forms of commissioned services and offers that exist within our communities, where many of our students live and work. This will not only forge support provision but employability links which we have already achieved with our successful Student Wellbeing Champion Scheme.

Continuous Improvement – in essence, this strand, and the work we do, whilst it will have a clear theory of change so that we know what success looks like, is also the equivalent of “painting the fourth bridge” we can never consider it a finished project and we will always be seeking continuous improvement.