THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
A SOUND STRATEGY
It may have divided the Higher Education sector, but one university is clear about how the strategic potential of the Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) can be realised. Sue Rigby, Assistant Principal, Taught Postgraduate Programmes, the University of Edinburgh explains…
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In this challenging world the HEAR offers a useful way of defining and developing that sense of ‘sustainable employability’, and locating it within the curriculum, and beyond it within the larger experience of being at university.
T
he current environment for Higher Education in the UK is one of intense scrutiny from government,
funding bodies QAA, NUS, and the public – and for those working in Scotland, the Holyrood government and the Scottish Funding Council. For all of these bodies, the broad, if sometimes poorly defined, concept of employability is central to their understanding of well constructed tertiary education. For Russell Group institutions, the ownership and
appropriate definition of this idea is critical to our success in integrating external demands with our internal culture. We understand the importance of producing graduates with excellent skills in work or further study. We have a track record of doing this. And the idea of developing graduate attributes in all our students provides a set of skills or attitudes to aim at which will support our graduates through diverse and uncertain career pathways. In this challenging world the HEAR offers a useful way of defining and developing that sense of ‘sustainable employability’, and locating it within the curriculum, and beyond it within the larger experience of being at university. The recording of marks for all courses successfully
undertaken, as has been the case in the European Diploma Supplement for some years, enables us to both celebrate the richness of course choices that we offer to students, but also to work with students to ensure that their choices are steps along a pathway to an individual education, part of the narrative that they will develop after graduation. Support for this process is costly, in money and in staff time, and a new Personal Tutor system which we have begun this year will take time to mature. However, that sense of individual pathways and forward thinking are the key points that our employer fora feed to us as desirable attributes within the workplace. The most useful, and challenging, part of the HEAR for us is section 6.1, where we are able to recognise activities
20 GRADUATE RECRUITER
undertaken by the student outside the formal curriculum. Our approach to this has been to ask a group of staff and students to make decisions about inclusion of activities in this field on behalf of the University. Their choices have been based on the premise that all students should have the opportunity to engage with activities recorded here, and that every element of this section of the HEAR should be important enough to stand alongside the degree designation.
In a range of elements that meet these
criteria, many are related to student engagement in learning and teaching, for example through acting as Class Representatives, feeding back commentary on the course to staff. This has allowed us to increase the profile of this role and to increase its visibility to the student body. Our worry that this part of the HEAR could turn into a
glorified ‘Duke of Edinburgh Award’, where engagement with individual activities serves as a proxy for an emergent set of qualities or capacities, is addressed by our development of the Edinburgh Award. This is a reflective bridge between something a student does outside the curriculum and the skills they use within it. Awards are being developed in a wide range of contexts within the University, for example among volunteers and among students who act as wardens and participants in Resident’s Life programmes within our Halls of Residence. At base, the Award allows students the reflective time to see the shared attributes that enable them to thrive in multiple settings at University, and which will allow them to thrive in work or further study after they leave. As our employability strategy begins to mature, it is
increasingly resting on the concepts that we draw from the HEAR, of the narrative journey of students through learning which the HEAR mirrors, and of the multiple locations within the university experience where useful and transferable skills are acquired. A rare combination, in these strange times, of an external driver of great versatility and potential use to us within the university sector.
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