A big thank you to each of you who completed our recent Supporting You survey - designed to create a snapshot of your experiences around belonging, feeling supported and part of our community, timetables and attendance behaviours.
We are happy to report:
67% of those who answered the survey, strongly agreed or agreed that they feel like they belong at university.
76% of those who answered, strongly agreed or agreed that they made the right decision in choosing to study at BU specifically.
61% of those who answered, strongly agreed or agreed, that they felt supported by BU.
47% of respondents strongly agreed / agreed that they see themselves as a part of the BU community.
According to your responses, friendships and social activities with friends, continue to have the most positive impact on your experiences at BU, closely followed by the support with learning from your programme teams and professional support colleagues, such as Programme Support Officers.
We asked about timetables, and your responses focused on a hope for fewer 9am starts and fewer late finishes. We have a central working group looking at the development of efficient and consistent timetables. However, with about 3,500 hours of teaching and learning activities a week on our campuses, we do need to use the full academic day of 9am to 7pm. Around 83 activities happen at the same time per core teaching hour in an average week. So, whilst we will continue to review programme timetables and aim for fair distribution of starts and finishes, the timetabling process is hugely complex. Nevertheless, we continue to work on improvements. What you told us around timetable enhancements has supported wider feedback we have received and validates the aims of our internal work on maximising the efficiency of timetables for students and colleagues.
Finally, we asked about reasons for non-attendance, and were pleased to see that most common response was that this question was not applicable as you usually attended. For those who did not attend, short term sickness was the most common reason, followed by not thinking the session would be useful.
The finer detail of this survey has allowed us to work with your faculties to look at your programmes specifically, to see how we might work with students to enhance experience in all these areas. We have asked Programme Leaders to work with Programme Reps in the next round of Student/Staff Forums, to explore the concepts of support and community and to make sure we are using shared language and understanding in these areas. We have also asked that teaching teams make it clear how each session relates to both your development, the intended outcomes of your degree and the wider BU Graduate Attributes, as necessary.
Thank you again to everyone who responded and the Spring Supporting You survey will be out in a few months!
