Working together to map and transform the student experience

At Essex SU, we work hard to reconcile the data and research we have on students with elected officer priorities.

Every year we spend the early part of the summer developing our “Big Plan”, and towards the end of the summer an invite from the VC goes out to all university staff inviting them to a presentation on the plan from officers.

This cements partnership and ensures that it’s not just senior staff “cascading” the information to teams in another email. It also gives us an annual synthesis point to work towards, and a helpful moment before term starts to sharpen officers’ public speaking skills.

But given the scale of the challenges ahead, earlier this year we started to identify limitations even with our annual Big Plan approach.

What’s going on right now – whether it’s increasing financial insecurity, resulting job losses and cuts or the rapidly changing profile of students – can feel overwhelming.

The challenges can sometimes seem insurmountable — so we wondered how on earth we might go about navigating a way through them?

Across the university, it felt like the student experience (especially non-academic aspects) did not have a strategy or vision, was not properly considered when decisions and plans were made about academic student experience.

We agreed with the university that they needed to be considered together – and that while the tone of the Big Plan work was right, it wasn’t generating awareness of the wider context.

For us, taking a step forward meant firstly taking a step back, and properly understanding what the student experience at Essex is really like – and then thinking through how decision makers at every level of the university might be able to embed that understanding into their work.

Why now?

The list of challenges above are already compelling enough.

For us we also had two significant additional drivers – the end of the University’s Strategic Plan, and an upcoming change in leadership with a new vice chancellor due to start in August.

So back in 2024, with support from the acting VC, the Pro Vice Chancellor (Education) and her team, we set sail on a landmark evaluation of the student experience – with the aim of informing and paving the way for a new strategic approach.

In other words, we knew that the University of Essex would soon be deciding which new mountains to climb – the aim of our project was to try and get us all to a basecamp of understanding together.

What did we do?

Importantly for us, this had to be a genuinely collaborative process between the SU and the university. We’ve had a brilliant track record of working in close partnership so going on this journey of understanding together was critical – we’re trying to inform the next phase of strategy for the institution as a whole.

So we took a proposal to the university steering group to set up a jointly chaired Student Experience Strategy Group with representatives from across the university and SU.

This has been co-chaired by the university’s PVC (Education) and Joe, VP Education.

A core team of four (Joe, Steve, and two senior colleagues within the university – the Dean of PGT Education and the Assistant Registrar) have led and delivered the day to day work, reporting our findings back to the steering group.

We wanted to do this in as honest and objective way as possible. This wasn’t about starting a process knowing what outcomes we were aiming for – it was about an honest evaluation of the student experience.

Inspired by the types of customer journey mapping and design-thinking that has been the foundation of huge improvements in other sectors, we wanted to spearhead a similar human-centric approach in Essex.

So we got stuck in, breaking the research phase down into two main chunks.

Student research

It’s the student experience (or more precisely the multitude of student experiences – plural) that we’re trying to understand, so the obvious starting point was listening to our members.

This meant new research – online and in person surveys, but also in person “activations”, where we asked students about their experiences – the good, the bad and the areas for improvement.

Importantly this involved us going to find students that might not always engage with us or walk past our door every day, so we held dedicated activations for student parents outside our day nursery, for commuting students waiting at bus stops or in our car parks etc.

In addition to this new research, we also reviewed more than 3 years of data, over 20,000 inputs, collected by the SU. This included our welcome surveys, teaching pulse surveys, data from our student voice groups in each department, our annual end of year survey and our new cross-institution termly student which has yielded rich, granular quantitative and qualitative data.

Staff research

Given that our aim was a comprehensive review of the experience, we always knew that this had to also consider what the Essex student experience looks like from the perspective of the thousands of university and SU staff that support, facilitate and deliver it each year.

We did this by staging an ambitious series of “mapping meetings” – focus groups with representatives covering all stages of the student journey from recruitment through to alumni.

These groups were about creating a space for honest reflection – something that all of the staff involved engaged with brilliantly, helping us identify where things were working well, pain points (for students and staff) and areas for improvement.

The power of these discussions can’t be underestimated. It was hard work and a massive commitment on top of everything else within this project (and the already busy day jobs) – but it was an incredibly rewarding experience for all involved.

For us it gave us super valuable insights from an operational level up to the most senior levels of the institution, while for the staff involved it was an almost cathartic opportunity to take a step back from the day to day and look at things through a different lens.

Outputs

Given the importance of this work we knew that we didn’t want to simply collate the findings into yet another report.

We wanted to create something more engaging and experiential so, not lacking in ambition, we decided to create a one-day conference called “Life at Essex: A Student Experience Conference”.

Inspired by the likes of Wonkhe’s Secret Life of Students conference, our aim was to share what we’d learned in the most engaging way possible – with a host of short, engaging updates from those involved in the project complimented by case studies from students and staff.

The conference took place in late June and was organised by both of us and our President (Lily-May Cameron) to form a key part of the new VC’s induction.

We invited senior staff and decision-makers, but we also opened the conference up to any staff member in the university who wanted to attend – providing a great opportunity for staff from all departments and levels to hear and engage with the content and ultimately gain a better understanding of the current student experience.

A more mixed, bottom-up room of people allowed us to talk about the bigger picture (as well as student priorities) and then capture where there were ideas or semi-open doors.

The conference was fully booked, indicating a high desire for this type of content.

We staged the conference in our student nightclub, Sub Zero, marking a shift to a different type of venue that most staff hadn’t previously visited, rather than the usual lecture theatre spaces.

This had a deliberate benefit of taking delegates out of their comfort zone and using a new environment to help encourage the absorption of new (and sometimes challenging) perspectives.

To further this aim we also mixed staff up on arrival – randomly allocating them to tables so they weren’t sat with people they knew in a way that encouraged the creation of new connections.

On the table in front of each delegate was a silver bell – the type you see on a hotel reception desk – that we encouraged delegates to press whenever they agreed with a point.

This allowed for a unique level of audience engagement with the presentations, creating flurries of gentle bell chimes in a way that felt natural and free of barriers, while providing a real-time sense of which points resonated most with delegates.

The feedback from the conference has been excellent – the engagement with our months of evaluation was significantly higher than if we’d have created a report, with 98 per cent of delegates saying they found the day insightful.

Delegates told us how hearing the feedback from students and other staff, and seeing the extent to which it crossed over, made a powerful impact – rather than this being overwhelming it provided a rare clarity on the current student experience that made planning for what comes next more achievable.

What’s next

This comprehensive evaluation of the student experience at Essex has provided us with that crucial basecamp we were seeking. By bringing together diverse perspectives from students and staff, we’ve created a shared understanding of where we are now, which positions us perfectly to chart the course ahead.

The collaborative nature of the project – from the joint leadership structure to the inclusive conference format – has demonstrated the power of partnership between the SU and the university. It’s shown that when we work together, listening to all voices in our community, we can transform seemingly insurmountable challenges into opportunities for positive change.

As our new VC settles in and the institution begins to develop its next strategic plan, we have a solid foundation of evidence and insight to build upon.

The mountains ahead may still look daunting, but at least now we’re all starting from the same basecamp, with a clear view of the terrain and a shared commitment to improving the student experience at Essex.

The journey continues – but we’re better equipped than ever to navigate it together.