ÐÓ°ÉappÏÂÔØ

A capstone new initiative in our student success strategy for 2023-24 is ‘GBS Student Success: Making a Difference 2023-24’.

The new initiative responds to feedback from our staff and our students, and our ongoing reflections on how to accelerate student academic progress and student satisfaction with significant impact. It builds on our recent successes in delivering a high-quality student experience, as demonstrated in National Student Survey 2023, demonstrating our strong commitment to supporting staff and students to deliver the best student experience.

Four priority areas for this academic year, the focus of GBS Student Success: Making a Difference 2023-24, are enhancing employability, embedding and extending internationalisation, further improving students’ academic progress, and increasing student satisfaction.

To help deliver these priorities, GBS Making a Difference has three main elements:

GBS Accelerate

Giving students opportunity to lead paid projects, helping School and Faculty leadership teams better understand and focus action on key areas of student experience.

GBS Progress

Giving staff opportunity to lead funded projects aimed at further improving student academic success on their programmes

GBS Impact

Providing each programme leader with voucher awards to allocate to those students providing the best feedback with positive impact on the student experience.

GBS Accelerate – Student-Led Action Projects

New for 2023-24, and building on our commitment to students as co-creators of the student experience, is ÐÓ°ÉappÏÂÔØ Business School’s Accelerate student project initiative.

Accelerate gives students opportunity to lead paid student experience projects, helping School and Faculty leadership teams better understand and focus action on key areas of student experience.

Accelerate offers those students leading projects a distinct opportunity to enhance their study, communication, and leadership skills, perfect for future job applications. They will develop projects with tangible positive impact, playing a key role in shaping the current and future student experience at and beyond university. Leading Accelerate projects will enhance CVs allowing students to showcase their leadership, communication and organisational skills.

Accelerate project leads will have support of GBS teams to assist in their work, helping with, for example, organisation and communications as each project develops. Each project lead will receive a consultancy voucher with time dedicated by Associate Dean Student Success, Associate Head of Student Success in the relevant School/Schools, Faculty Technology Enhanced learning Lead, Faculty Senior Tutor, and the GBS events team. Vouchers will be spent in different ways depending on the nature of the project and the type of support needed.

Priority Areas

Employability enhancement x1

GBS student perspective on improving student employability

Internationalisation x1

Increasing GBS student engagement with international study opportunities

Student academic progression x1

A GBS student perspective on student progression challenges and how to address them

Student satisfaction x2

A GBS student perspective on providing interesting and stimulating teaching in GBS

Each focus provides a broad idea of the themes we see as important for each project to target. The precise nature of the project is to be defined initially by the student lead and the refined in discussions with academic staff.

Each project lead will receive £300 for the time the time they invest in the project, once the project has been signed off by the Associate Dean for Student Success. They will also have access to up to £200 to cover reasonable costs associate with delivering the project brief. The project lead would be required to provide regular updates on the project as it develops and then to complete a 500 word summary report to include an explanation of the project  focus, actions taken and recommendations.

A 100-word outline of the project should be produced by any student interested in pursuing a project. The project outlines will be reviewed by the Associate Dean for Student Success and Associate Heads of School for Student Success to decide which projects will be supported.

If you are interested, you can  find out more by contacting us here.

GBS Progress – Staff Led Action Projects

A second new initiative within the GBS Making a Difference 2023-24 student success package is GBS Progress, focusing on student continuation. GBS Progress is a support fund targeted at helping us improve continuation on programmes with the most significant continuation issues.

Continuation is a strategic priority for the University in 2023-24, having significant impact on league table position, so it is important we address the area as a faculty priority. However, much more importantly, we know that failure to progress has significant and sometimes life changing impact on our students, so it’s crucial we do all we can to support them for that reason. The primary goal for GBS Progress is, therefore, to give our students the best possible opportunity to progress, securing their degree awards and maximising their academic potential.

The funding in place and associated projects will therefore be targeted at aspects of provision where we can have the biggest impact in improving student continuation. Because these are staff led, the projects will benefit from substantial academic insights into the challenges facing students continuation wise, focusing on specific, evidenced, measures with impact in the 2023-24 academic year. An underlying principle of the find is to give academic staff better platform to enhance continuation across our diverse cohorts.

When deciding which projects to fun, preference will be given to programme areas with then most significant continuation issues, seeking to improve continuation this academic year.

There will be up £1,000 per project and up to five projects in total. Projects with significant anticipated impact meriting modest additional funding above £1,000 will be considered.

A 100-word outline of the project should be produced by the academic lead interested in pursuing a GBS Progress project. The project outlines will be reviewed by the Associate Dean for Student Success and Associate Heads of School for Student Success to decide which projects will be supported.

If you are interested, you can  find out more by contacting us here.

GBS Impact – Student Feedback Recognition Initiative

A third initiative in our new ‘GBS Student Success: Making a Difference 2023-24’ package is GBS Impact. This initiative is an extension of our GBS student voice strategy and recognises the best student feedback on each programme with positive impact on the student experience. We know that feedback from students is crucial for a healthy, vibrant programme, allowing students opportunity to shape their student experience as co-creators.

The GBS Impact initiative will, therefore, provide each programme leader with x2 £20 vouchers per programme to award for the best suggestions from students with positive impact on the student experience. These suggestions may emerge during the early module feedback process but they may also arise during Programme Committee Meetings (PCMs), via email or in informal conversations. If they do, and if they have impact, we think it important to acknowledge them at Faculty level.

Relevant timelines:

Because we have three start dates across the provision, September, January and April, the deadlines for PLs to decide on spend vary. The vouchers should be decided and allocated before the end of the taught period for each programme, which broadly speaking, means before the end of two terms with one voucher allocated per term.

Once allocated, the programme leader is asked to provide the student name and specific reason for award for the Associate Head Student Success in their area. We will then collate the suggestions, identifying and sharing areas of good practice, communicate the awards in internal communications and issue thanks on behalf of Faculty.