Professional support staff's crucial role in improving student outcomes is often overlooked by senior management, a study claims.
While academic support staff are often credited with keeping a university ticking over, their direct contribution to raising student satisfaction scores, reducing dropout rates and aiding graduate employment rates is felt to be largely ignored, according to the analysis, published in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management last month.
Based on interviews with 28 academic support staff at universities in the UK and Australia, the paper, titled “Exploring the contribution of professional staff to student outcomes: a comparative study of Australian and UK case studies”, says that while “middle managers (immediate supervisors) were viewed as positively valuing their staff that was not the case with senior management”.
Teaching satisfaction scores, as measured by the UK's National Student Survey, were a good example of where the contribution of professional service staff was overlooked, with the lion’s share of credit generally going to academics, one of the report’s authors, Julie-Anne Regan, an education developer at the University of Liverpool's Centre for Lifelong Learning, told Times Higher Education.
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Kim Flintoff
onto Higher Education Teaching and Learning |
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