Academic Personal Tutors (APTs) help students make the most of their degree and university experience. Find out about the role of an APT, how to support your students and training you are advised to complete.
- Supporting and enhancing student experience
Academic Personal Tutoring at Sussex looks to go beyond an ethos of support, and towards one also of enhancement. It aims to be proactive, encouraging all students to get the most from their studies.
The Academic Personal Tutor (APT) has a crucial role in enabling students to secure positive outcomes from their course and directly shapes students’ experience of the University. The APT is one of the key relationships that a student has with Sussex.
The Academic Personal Tutoring Framework provides a baseline for delivering effective tutoring, which Schools and Faculties can build from. Ensuring a broad consistency in academic personal tutoring means that students know what to expect from their time at Sussex. The APT helps students to navigate the resources available to them and enables them to support one another through common frames of reference.
The guidance and resources included here support Academic Personal Tutors. These pages will be developed and updated over the academic year, particularly through the Academic Personal Tutor and Academic Success Tutor (AST) community. APTs can provide any feedback to Faculty/School student experience leads and ASTs.
The Academic Personal Tutoring framework
Academic Personal Tutoring at Sussex is guided by seven principles and four aims, developed with staff and students. They set out consistent expectations for how all Academic Personal Tutoring should work in practice, even where there are differences in implementation.
- Principles
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All students should have a named Academic Personal Tutor for academic support who is a member of academic staff, with the aim of enabling positive relational connection between the University and learning communities.
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All undergraduate students should have continuity of Academic Personal Tutor (where possible) throughout their main degree.
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All students should have regular, structured and purposeful engagement with an Academic Personal Tutor, participation with which should be recorded.
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Academic Personal Tutors have oversight of a student’s course of study and support students to make academic progress, including helping them to navigate University environments taking into account students’ cultural and academic contexts.
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Academic Personal Tutors support students to reflect on and synthesize information from assessment feedback and grades, and to develop strategies in response to these.
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Academic Personal Tutors should provide a supportive, non-judgemental first-point-of-contact for student pastoral matters, where necessary, and guide students to appropriate specialist support within the University.
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Academic Personal Tutors should undertake regularly updated training relevant to the tutoring role.
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- Aims
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Ensure parity and consistency in academic personal tutoring that all students can expect institution-wide.
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Establish consistent routes and levels of expert academic support to enable success, especially for students facing additional academic barriers.
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Provide clarity for staff and students on the role of academic personal tutoring and sustainable structures around this (particularly in relation to boundaries between the academic and pastoral), including how the role is recognised and rewarded.
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Provide opportunities for all students to form positive relational connections with the University, encouraging a sense of academic belonging, and a structure in which the individual needs of our students are respected and supported through a personalised, holistic and inclusive approach.
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