Financial Statements 2019/2020
SUPPORT FOR OUR STUDENTS
Personalising support
Personal tutors play a vital role in supporting students to settle into university and ease transition from one level to the next. We are piloting ways to support tutors and improve personal tutoring, including enhancing the dashboard that measures student engagement and alerts tutors to concerns, for example if a student is regularly missing lectures. We are also trialling a curriculum for tutorials. This will help tutors anticipate student concerns, particularly at transition points across the academic year, and highlight resources and opportunities to students.
Student health and wellbeing
We partnered with Premier Medical Centre to encourage more students to register with a GP, and make sure they were up to date with vaccinations, particularly meningitis, measles, mumps and rubella. We ran several events on campus and offered on the spot registration and vaccinations from pods in Sheppard Library. We had planned to run fortnightly GP clinics on campus but these were stopped because of the coronavirus outbreak.
All staff and students now have free access to the Fika smartphone app, which provides exercises and resources to help manage mental health and wellbeing. Staff and students can also receive online support from Togetherall, to help with anxiety, depression, stress and other mental health issues. It offers peer-to-peer support, a wide range of mental health resources, and is monitored by trained professionals. These are just two examples of how we have been making sure students have access to a range of mental health and wellbeing support. Others include our Keep Calm and Sing sessions which focused on deep breathing for relaxation, and Yoga for Wellbeing sessions.
The Students’ Union worked with the charity Rethink Mental Illness to train students to become Wellbeing Heroes. Rethink Mental Illness funded the training and group work sessions. We have introduced a 20-minute mental health training for all new students, from online training providers UniHeads. This includes useful information such as how to support a friend experiencing mental health issues.
above: Students engaging with Canine Teaching Assistants
The Accommodation team continues to hire students living in halls as resident assistants. Throughout lockdown, we have worked closely with them to support those students who have stayed on in halls and to tackle issues of loneliness and isolation.
Our Canine Teaching Assistants (CTAs) project introduced last year has proved to be hugely popular with students. Students can join drop-in sessions and spend time with the dogs – which is proven to reduce stress and anxiety. Many who hadn’t previously engaged with the University’s Counselling Service decided to do so after meeting the CTAs. Academic research investigating the therapeutic use of dogs among university students is also underway. After the success of the dogs, in February 2020 we introduced Feline Teaching Assistants – cats who meet students for weekly, two-hour drop-in sessions.
Understanding our commuter students
Three quarters (76%) of our UK students travel over 40 minutes to reach our campus. Research we carried out last year found that students living within 20 minutes of campus have much higher continuation rates than those living further away. We set up an advisory group around commuter students and are now using research to develop ways to address this issue.
Middlesex University
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