Partnership going beyond Student Voice: Introducing the Portsmouth Student Outcomes Project

Across two decades, there has been much great work co-produced as a result of closer working between our University of Portsmouth Students’ Union (UPSU) and the University, where Students’ Union-University partnership has been core to our student voice activities.

Student-staff partnership, a closer union

Student-Staff Partnership is championed at course level through co-design activities and Student Voice Committees to continually enhance and adapt our programmes to support learning. This is repeated across the institution, where particularly strategic partnerships between UPSU’s officers and the University were critical to the success of the University’s response to the pandemic and recent Teaching Excellence Framework submission. Such initiatives as the People of a Global Majority (PGM) Ambassadors, the 7 Steps to Success Programme, and expansion of Peer Assisted Learning, have all been the result of an ever productive partnership between our Students’ Union and the University.

Supporting student outcomes

In the last academic year, our partnership has taken this work further, to further support student outcomes during the cost-of-living crisis, regulation under B3, and returning to campus-based activities beyond Covid-19. Higher Education providers, like Portsmouth, are becoming increasingly agile to respond in a timely fashion and conduct targeted work with certain student groups and areas of academic provision.

Therefore, at the start of 2022-23, UPSU and the University of Portsmouth co-funded a pilot to better support student outcomes, and to address the above challenges through enhancing student satisfaction, belonging and retention. This substantial investment of increased staffing, student-staffing and non-staffing resource in UPSU, has led to supporting targeted solutions to improve student outcomes, in partnership with course teams and students.

Students’ Union Consultancy Service

Over the last year, the newly-formed Students’ Union Consultancy Service, funded by the pilot, has started over 48 projects working in partnership with academic and professional service colleagues, and successfully delivered 22 of these, with others ready for implementation/delivery next year. Such examples include:

●      The co-creation and co-design of a sensory room calm space for students to support wellbeing during the assessment period

●      The co-creation and delivery of organisation and time management drop-ins and 121 support sessions to help students better prepare for the assessment period

●      The creation of a new Hardship Fund application support service within UPSU, supported and co-designed with University Student Finance

Enhancing our campus community

As we end the first year of this new service at Portsmouth, we’ have realised the great potential that engaging student leaders has in uncovering hidden student issues such as attendance, and how student-led activities can have a positive reported benefit on the student community. We’ are now open for service for the summer and Teaching Term 1, where the SU, supported by colleagues in the University’s Department of Curriculum, Quality and Enhancement, Planning, and Careers and Employability Service, are ready to co-design solutions with colleagues and students to greater enhance our campus community.

Authors: Tom Lowe is a Senior Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Portsmouth and Brendan McCarthy is Head of Representation, University of Portsmouth Students Union). For more information on the project, please contact brendan.mccarthy@upsu.net.