Designing a Personal Tutoring System

The design of a new programme will require programmes undergoing PEAR to consider these questions:

Describe your Personal Tutoring System, including its purpose and how it will be delivered.
What resource requirements do you envisage as a result of this design/approach and are they realistic?
Explain how your Personal Tutoring System will be evaluated.

On an annual basis, the EAR evaluation questions will be put to the programme teams:

What is the programme’s approach to personal tutoring?
What does the approach set out to achieve, what is its purpose?
What does the evaluation of your Personal Tutoring System tell you, how successful is the approach and what evidence do you have for this?
What improvements or refinements do you plan to make over the coming year?

Evaluate
The design process starts with evaluation of an existing system. As a starting point and to feed into the Educational Annual Review (EAR), Personal Tutoring systems should be evaluated to interrogate their effectiveness and likely impact.
A purpose statement for personal tutoring was developed and refined by input from academics across the institution:
Facilitate students’ personal development and academic progress, achievement, career readiness, aspirations and transitions into and out of university education over time, by encouraging the formation of purposeful relationships with clear boundaries, between students and academic staff, to help students to navigate their own pathways towards autonomy and success.
A system using this as a purpose could be evaluated by the following questions:
Do discipline-appropriate personal tutoring activities facilitate the formation of purposeful relationships between tutors and tutees?
Does the personal tutoring system operate within institutional/faculty/ departmental resource allocations (including work loading)?
Does the personal tutoring system contribute to students’ ability to navigate pathways to autonomy and success?
Evidence can be found from, for example, student satisfaction surveys (NSS, ISS), student focus groups or from interactions with students once they have graduated. Teams should consider re-visiting the system they have designed to identify improvements.
Purpose

Identify the purpose of the personal tutoring system you are designing. This should take account of key institutional priorities of employability and progression for all groups of students. There is the temptation to see personal tutoring as a solution for a wide range of important issues. However, it is useful to focus the purpose of a Personal Tutoring System onto a small number of achievable (and student-led?) priorities.
You may decide to use the purpose statement on the previous page, to tweak it, or to develop a programme level purpose relevant to your own context.

Features

This list indicates a number of features that different tutorial systems might use. It is probably not desirable for one system to have all of the elements outlined below. Thus the design of a system for personal tutorials would include a process of selecting the features that will deliver the purpose of the system within the human, physical and financial resources available; a system designed on a more selective basis is likely to be more successful in achieving its aim.

The emphasis of your PTS could vary at different levels. E.g. skill development at Level 4; goal setting for academic progress at Level 5; dissertation progress, autonomy and career planning at Level 6.

You may wish to use the Personal Tutoring Management Plan.

Key: 🛠️ Course 🙋 Community 😊 Career

Feature	Description
PT Meetings	Most commonly 1:1 (individual) but could be group.
Integration of PT purpose(s) with existing elements of curriculum	Some systems use core curriculum units/modules to ‘deliver’ aspects of the personal tutoring experience. 🛠️ 🙋
Monitoring function for engagement with course	Some systems use the tutor-student relationship and usually, the meetings, to advance attendance or engagement targets for the course as a whole. The danger of this approach is that it can compromise the student-tutor relationship if the function is too heavily weighted towards this as a purpose. 🛠️ 🙋
Study skills development	Some systems, often those with delivery of aspects of personal tutoring in core units also offer elements of skills development, particularly in level 4 core units. 🛠️ 🙋 😊
	Some systems may use personal tutoring time for coaching conversations towards future planning in terms of destinations after university. 😊
Goal setting (for academic progress)	Some systems may use personal tutoring for goal setting towards academic progress in particular units, or to improve in certain aspects such as presentational assessments. 🛠️
Personal development	Some systems may focus on the development of the whole person particularly in relation to their own professional practice (common on health care or Art and Design practice). 🛠️ 😊
Pastoral support	Systems of personal tutoring often have an element, whether deliberately by design or not, of pastoral support, with students seeking help with personal issues. Design decisions around this will have implications for training and communication with students and student services. 🙋
Transition support	A system designed to be ‘front-loaded’ towards the transition from school or college into university. The degree to which this is seen as an essential design feature of the system may set a theme for the system as a whole. May also be about transition to next life stage after university. 🙋 😊
Flexible engagement	A system might be designed to be very structured, predictable and thus relatively inflexible. Or it might be that it is designed to be as flexible as possible to students diverse needs. This decision will have important implications for communication and resourcing. For example, if there are meetings as part of a flexible system these could be via Skype, in person, via email, as and when needed (but might require a model of staff engagement that is not sustainable).
Promotes Personal Autonomy	A programme might decide to allow students to choose whether to engage or not with the PTS. A decision not to monitor the personal tutoring system could be seen in terms of the right of the student to autonomy. 😊
Coaching approaches	Widely adopted for student guidance. Coaching approaches allow students to come to their own conclusions following guided questioning. Can be used in formal and informal meetings.
Mentorship	More likely to be used in a 1:1 situations. This is more of an apprenticeship model of learning from an ‘expert’. Some personal tutoring systems may have elements of this where staff and students have close professional ties perhaps during placements or in art and design practice. Peer mentoring systems may be used as part of a personal tutoring package at the time of transition into university. 🙋 😊
Consistency of experience	Allocation of students to tutors: wherever possible the same personal tutor sticking with tutees throughout their programme and/or teaching the tutee on some units.
Effective referral	An essential feature of PTS so students are referred appropriately to university services.

Resourcing

This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of designing a personal tutoring system. The offer made to students needs to be a sincere one and this means that it needs to be appropriately resourced to achieve its purpose. If there are more features included than can be resourced, then students may respond negatively to this.
Choices need to be made around who will be involved in personal tutoring. For example, will all academics be personal tutors, including professors? Are there ancillary support services that form part of the resource? The assumptions around this will need checking.
Operationalisation
Identify how your personal tutoring system will be managed. The Personal Tutoring Management Plan can help here.
Things you will need to consider:
Who will be take overall responsibility for managing and developing the personal tutoring system?
Who will generate a scheme of work (if an embedded curriculum delivery model is used) and resources required to support the delivery of the three Cs (course, community and career).
Who is responsible for allocating personal tutors?
Who will identify training requirements for personal tutoring?
How will the particular personal tutoring system be socialised amongst staff?
Who will manage any issues that may arise. For example, where students or staff report a personal tutoring relationship has broken down.
Who will coordinate with the ancillary support services?
What data will you be collecting for the Educational Annual Review?
Who will collect the data and provide an analysis?
Training
UTA offer a range of training opportunities that are available on a scheduled workshop basis or can be arranged for bespoke sessions for programme teams and departments. These include:
Designing a Personal Tutoring System.
Personal Tutoring: Using coaching (GROW coaching model).
Personal Tutoring: Hard conversations, referrals and boundaries (BATHE coaching model).
My Five Year Plan.
To register for these events, visit the UTA’s workshops intranet page.
Communication

How will the purpose and operation of your personal tutoring system be communicated to students and staff? For the system to work well, it is important that both the students and staff involved have clearly aligned expectations. This will promote the conditions for purposeful relationships to be developed. One way to do this could be to develop a one-page poster / flyer /Moodle notice that can be used to advertise personal tutoring.

Good Practice - examples of personal tutoring systems

Find out more about:

Sport and Exercise Sciences
Strategy, Enterprise and Sustainability
English

Sport and Exercise Sciences

Historically, in the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences, Personal Tutors met with their tutees five times a year in one-to-one or small group meetings. However, during COVID the Department pivoted instead to delivering Personal Tutoring via taught, online delivery through core units (e.g. Academic Skills at L4 or Research Methods at L5). Each week had a clear skills focus and was linked to the University’s My Five Year Plan cycle: self-assessment; goal-setting; activity selection; activity completion; activity reflection. Tutors guided their tutees and at L4 marked an element of the unit’s coursework. To support this process, staff were ‘buddied’ with another tutor, allowing them to team teach the sessions, something which worked really well and received positive feedback from staff. In addition, these home units used the Microsoft Teams ‘channel’ function to encourage communication between all the Personal Tutors (at each level) and key support staff (inc. technical and careers services). During this time, these home units with this strategy achieved very good results and positive ISS feedback.

Making the bold decision to invest [staff time] significantly in personal tutoring paid off for our department. Over the pandemic we were able to maintain our staff-student learning community approach to UG teaching through regular (initially weekly, then monthly from November onwards), task-focused personal tutoring meetings. The challenge will be to maintain this significant time-investment, as we return onto campus.

- Dr Clare Pheasey, Principal Lecturer and BASES Accredited Sport Scientist

Strategy, Enterprise and Sustainability

The Department of Strategy, Enterprise and Sustainability in the Faculty of Business and Law (FoBL) deliver Personal Tutoring on a Digital Awareness and Professional Development unit (and Employability Skills and Enhancing your Digital footprint for Level 5 and Professional Practice at Level 6). Personal Tutors are trained accredited Strengths Coaches and deliver coaching while teaching their tutees on these units using a STRENGTHS profile, which they were trained to use by Cappfinity, the global leader in strengths-based assessment and development. The Personal Tutor Coordinator roles, which FoBL has in place across all seven Departments, further help support the Personal Tutors and the Personal Tutoring System and all colleagues are trained on Presto.

The use of the strengths profile coaching and integrating personal tutoring with professional development has ensured that personal tutoring is a key pillar within the students’ academic life and focusses the role of the personal tutor into one that is positive and meaningful.

- Tracy Bingham, Lecturer / Personal Tutor Lead / Employability Lead / Year Manager

English

Having tried several approaches to Personal Tutoring over the years, the Department of English now introduce tutors to their tutees through a core first-year unit about the city of Manchester, which is called Metropolis. The unit allows tutors to get to know their tutees by teaching them about a topic they all have in common: the city they have chosen to study in. By reading novels and watching films about Manchester, students learn key skills needed for the rest of their course while also establishing a relationship with their Personal Tutor that will support them over their remaining three years of study.

Our Personal Tutoring System through Metropolis has really supported our progression and retention of students, even during the pandemic.

- Dr Nicola Bishop, Senior Lecturer in English literature and Department Education Lead

Dr Eileen Pollard SFHEA

Senior Lecturer in Academic Development

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Personal Tutoring Contact

If you have further questions about Personal Tutoring, please contact Eileen Pollard. Click on the profile card for more details.

Designing a Personal Tutoring System