Common use of Student Progression Clause in Contracts

Student Progression. The University Employability Strategy will continue to ensure that employability is embedded into our curriculum. All academic departments produce Employability Plans, with departmental Employability Leads working with central Careers Consultants to ensure we proactively support students in developing employability skills throughout the student journey. Careers Consultants will also be working with departmental Employability Leads on a range of new initiatives to help students develop their employability skills, engage with employers and other external organisations and create more volunteering and placement opportunities. ▇▇▇▇▇ – an on-line Skills and Personal Reflective Activity tool has been created to help students develop a better understanding of their own skills and abilities, identify areas for development, and assemble personalised evidence related to their acquisition of Personal, Employability and Digital Skills. This is particularly useful in flagging up students who have been disadvantaged or had fewer opportunities to access employability learning and experiences. Academic departments have enthusiastically embraced this and currently 9 bespoke versions have been developed. Personal development in terms of confidence building, and developing essential employability skills, is at the heart of our employability strategy. A continuing objective is to increase the number of academic societies allowing students the opportunity to take greater ownership over their learning experience by moulding their extracurricular activity. As well as increasing engagement levels we are committed to working with our society groups in order to recognise their skills and to ensure that the skills gained in this area are transferable and articulated well in order to enhance students’ employability. As well as the direct, tangible benefits which will come from this to individual participants, these activities will play a major role in building the community and providing opportunities for engagement. They thus support both student retention and success as well as progression. Ensuring equality of opportunity for all students is a fundamental part of our ethos and we recognise that for many, apparent ‘opportunities’ are inaccessible due to financial constraints. In 2017, we therefore introduced of ‘The Student Opportunity Fund’, specifically designed to fund extracurricular activities. This funds study enhancement activity for all students at Departmental level to ensure consistency of experience and opportunity (e.g. field trips for biologists, visits to Parliament for politics students, enterprise competition fees for business students, trips to Brussels for law students, film festivals for film and TV students, theatre visits for drama students); it also supports individual students to take life-enhancing opportunities. There are no constraints on how this element of the fund can be used except that there must be a tangible benefit to the students individually or collectively, most often in terms of developing their employability skills. At an individual or group level, this fund is used to support students in a range of ways: to take unpaid internships, to perform artistic works (such as at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe), deliver papers at overseas conferences, to support internal summer research internships for undergraduates or to take advantage of overseas cultural visits, for example to China. For many of our students, such opportunities would be entirely theoretical without financial support and such experiences are often transformational, exposing students to new cultures, experiences and ways of seeing the world. In 2017/18, the University will seek to appoint a new member of staff in Careers, who will work alongside other new post-holders in Student Recruitment and Student Services. The post holder will offer dedicated support to non-traditional learners in our priority groups. This we believe will provide a more holistic joined-up approach to students with particular characteristics across each stage of the student journey, supporting them to take advantage of the opportunities available to them.