Earlier this year, the SU Advice Team conducted a research project to improve the accessibility of our service and understand how students are interacting with us. Our big aim was to make sure students beyond the undergraduate population feel seen, heard, and equipped to thrive at UAL. The project underpins the SU’s strategic aim to deliver advice service excellence.

In the past, we have received feedback that the SU Advice Service is great at supporting the needs of undergraduate students but students from other demographics often face challenges and barriers that are not always addressed by undergraduate-focused guidance from us and UAL. So, we took time this year to begin breaking down this one-size-fits-all approach and, based on feedback and advice statistics, focussed on the following demographics:

1. Postgraduate (including Masters students and PhD researchers)

2. Pre-degree/further education students (specific to UAL)

3. International students

4. Disabled students (inclusive of long-term physical and mental health conditions, and neurodiversity)

We expected to hear from students that our resources were not quite up to scratch with what was expected and that they weren’t tailored enough to our focus demographics. Our early ideas for a solution were to create a collection of ‘hub’ style pages (International student? Here’s all the advice you’ll need!).

The feedback from the surveys and focus groups indicated that, generally, students are happy with the content of the Advice website but that the website itself can be challenging to navigate. We also learned that low awareness of the Advice Service was the biggest barrier to accessing it.

Our timeline…

January/February: Plan outreach and develop survey questions

February/March: Preparation tasks (booking spaces, securing resources)

March/April: Deliver outreach stalls and collect student feedback

April: Recruit focus group participants

April/May: Host focus groups

May: Crunch the data

June/July: Finalise the research report, plan next steps, and share our findings

After our first survey stall (pictured) we tweaked the questions and hosted a couple more stalls. The next step was to use the outcomes from the surveys to build our set of questions for the focus groups. If you’re interested in joining future SU focus groups, sign up to be a Research Insider.

What we found out…

• 69% of surveyed students told us the found the Advice Service resources helpful (23% said not applicable)
• 56% of surveyed students have used the Advice Service website
• Many surveyed students did not know that the SU Advice Service exists, and some got us confused with UAL’s Advice Service

Read the report in full.

What we’re going to do…

We have developed a plan based on our research findings. Some of our actions are:

• Improve visibility for appointment booking
• Review our webpages to ensure content is easy to read
• Introduce more visuals into our webpages
• Keep students up-to-date with more frequent features in the SU Newsletter
• And so much more!

As always, our Advisers are available in-person, via Teams, telephone and email. You can either book an appointment or contact them via email at advice@su.arts.ac.uk.