What is a Student Support Strategy?
It’s a document for the entire university which outlines how the College will support its students. Its principles should influence everything the College does, the decisions it makes and their impact on student welfare, and improve our capacity to support students.
This year, working with the College and students at every level, we quickly discovered that while the College had developed a number of institutional strategies, it didn’t have one for student wellbeing, or student support. Working with the College to create one became one of our principal goals. As a result, the Provost Board has expressed its backing of a Student Support Strategy which sets out key principles and actions that aims to ensure coherent and consistent developments in student support across the College.
What happened?
Making change is difficult. To work together to improve things, you can’t just complain that things are wrong – you need to be able to offer solutions. Chippy and I worked on creating a draft vision and recommendations to present to the College, which they could use as a template to create a strategy with us.
We worked in partnership with the College, in particular the Director of Student Services, Hannah Bannister, to develop this strategy. A large part of our role after this was in lobbying the College and its core leadership to understand why we were undertaking this work, and how important it was for students. The Provost’s Board is the committee at the College which oversees this work, so it was these key decision makers in particular we worked with to explain why we needed a strategy for student support.
Chippy and I, together with the Director of Student Services, presented the draft strategy to the Provost’s Board at the end of March. It was this committee which had the authority to endorse the strategy and give it support from the highest level of the College. The board enthusiastically endorsed the draft and its principles, and set us to the task of developing the final strategy, to be presented to the board again in the next academic year.
What's next?
What do we expect on the horizon? We hope that Student Support Strategy will change the landscape of student support at Imperial entirely. We want it to challenge staff behaviour, funding decisions and wellbeing outcomes for all our members. As well as being a world leading STEM institution, we aspire to become sector-leading in student support with a cohesive, comprehensive and tailored support programme for our community of students.
It’s essential that we hear from you – the students that this strategy aims to support. We need to get your views to shape the draft, and for you to tell the Union and the College how you should be supported at Imperial.
Have your say!
We need your feedback on this crucial project: your thoughts on the draft strategy, as well as your personal experience of student support at Imperial. Through understanding the experience of our community of students, we can work with the College to shape solutions that work for you. There are several ways you can get involved in this project and sharing your feedback:
- Come and find us at one of our pop-up stalls:
- Monday 18 June, 11:30 – 13:30 @ SAF Foyer
- Tuesday 19 June, 11:30 – 13:30 @ Junior Common Room (JCR)
- Wednesday 20 June, 11:30 – 13:30 @ Sherfield Foyer
- Thursday 21 June, 11:30 – 13:30 @ Main Entrance, Business School
- Friday 22 June, 11:30 – 13:30 @ Reynolds Building, Charing Cross
- Monday 25 June, 11:30 – 13:30 @ Reynolds Building, Charing Cross
- Tuesday 26 June, 11:30 – 13:30 @ Sherfield Foyer
- Get in touch with me, your Deputy President (Welfare).
- Read the draft Student Support Strategy here.
- Complete a short survey on the strategy here.
Thank you for your valuable feedback!
If you have questions and want to talk about this project, please get in touch with me anytime, dpwelfare@imperial.ac.uk
