Broadcast: News items

Jayne Aldridge, Director for the Student Experience

On 25 April, I was delighted when we opened the doors to our new Student Centre. Whilst we’d always planned for this to be a ‘soft launch’, enabling students and staff to test out the building before the new academic year when we bring more services into the building, I could not have anticipated how transformative the space has already become to our students’ experiences at Sussex. The light-filled, airy space is busy with students studying informally, meeting friends or tutors, or making use of the many services that the Student Experience teams provide.

To enable us to continuously improve the experiences at Sussex that our students have come to anticipate, we’ve considered the structures that we have in place within the Division, to better enable us to have the right level of resource in the right place at the right time across the academic and calendar years.

When the pandemic was at its height, my whole Division was working differently – supporting varying needs, and in a different, virtual way, as well as continuing to offer in-person provision, outside of the national lockdown periods. Now, as most of our students have returned to campus, we are looking forward, having taken time to think and importantly to listen, about how the Student Experience teams work with our students and colleagues across the university.

As part of this review, we have considered the shape of the Division, its structures, and staff roles, to ensure we will serve the University and its students needs in the coming years.

The reconfiguration is organised thematically and provides a framework that both retains professional practice whilst enabling greater flexibility to the service provision. In turn, this allows for a better return on investment via delivery mechanisms and structures that lend themselves to high volume contact, delivered in a meaningful way and without dilution of quality or by compromising customer service standards. This new structure should be more suitable for our staff delivering this provision and for the numbers of students involved in accessing services.

The reconfiguration has major strengths and draws together the combined resources of existing professional practice areas, whilst enabling the optimised provision of practitioner, first response and administrative resources, to enhance the student experience, reinforce good practice and remove unnecessary duplication.

The structure lends itself to closer integration between DSE and School based staff, either through a combination of business partnership arrangements with key staff designated to specific Schools/Clusters or embedded staff through a hub and spoke model at Cluster level.

The reconfiguration brings in a clear framework for partnership working with the Academic Schools and with Professional Service Divisions, to ensure we are offering effective and efficient services to everyone.

Academic Services will provide the core function of academic development by bringing together pedagogic and educational research practice, technical innovation and academic enhancement into one cohesive area. Core student administration functions will provide underpinning stability across the academic and student lifecycles and quality standards and partnerships, including academic committee servicing and oversight; providing a robust yet flexible framework in which to ensure appropriate checks and balances are in place to maintain academic standards.

As we’ve gone through this process, as part of the wider Size and Shape and One Professional Service Programmes, several colleagues have also taken the opportunity to seek new challenges or take their careers in a different direction, including as part of the voluntary severance scheme.

Therefore, we are currently in a period of focused recruitment – filling new roles that have been created within the new structure, so that we are fully resourced and ready to welcome new and returning students from September. We have taken a phased approach to recruiting to the vacant posts across the Division, starting with roles where applicants are likely to have long notice periods. Already we’re starting to reap the benefits, and many roles have been filled and new colleagues are starting to join the team, alongside some exciting internal moves and promotions as we nurture our existing talent.

As we’ve taken this journey, I have been very mindful of the expectations that service users (both students and staff) have, and working alongside colleagues in the Division, we have delivered high-quality seamless services, and managed significant changes within our own teams. The resilience and dedication my colleagues have shown has been extraordinary, and they have my continuing thanks and gratitude.

We have been reshaping our summer service offer, to enable colleagues within the Division to have time to acclimatise to their new roles, business processes and systems to support the new ways of working. Any temporary changes to summer service response times will be issued very soon.

The reconfiguration brings in a clear framework for partnership working with the Academic Schools and, where appropriate with Professional Service Divisions, to ensure we are offering effective and efficient services to everyone.

I look forward to being able to share more information with you about the new structure and refreshed services – and most importantly our people, over the next month to ensure that everyone knows where to go, when and whom to contact for 2022-23.