On 21 June 2021, the Office for Students sent all providers new guidance on branding in relation to the Teaching Excellence Framework, noting that providers are advised not to promote or communicate their TEF award for student information from September 2021, until the publication of outcomes under the new TEF.
The new guidance can be viewed here.
|
|
|
60 SECONDS WITH STEVEN MONSEY, PARTNERSHIPS MANAGER
Tell us about your role at UEA
I’m one of three Partnerships Managers in the Academic Partnerships team and I currently support Mountview, South Essex College and West Suffolk College. I also have the pleasure of managing our wonderful Partnerships Coordinators.
How has your role changed as a result of COVID-19?
The main change has been not physically going out and about to partners. It was one of my favourite aspects of my job as I love meeting people and seeing the impact our work has on students. Working from home has meant that I also miss the social aspects of working on campus, seeing friends and family (there’s more than one member of the Monsey family working at UEA!). However, it brings its benefits too; meeting and connecting with people is quicker and easier, albeit through Teams.
What would surprise people to know about you?
I am absolutely obsessed with food, cooking and baking and have been since I was a child. Many of my memories from growing up revolve around eating or spending time in the kitchen with my nan, who was a fantastic cook. When I go on holidays and trips away there is always a bucket list of culinary delights and destinations I must try. Most of my weekends are spent testing new recipes or perfecting old ones. In the last year, I set myself the mission to bake the perfect loaf of bread as this had always been a weakness of mine. I started keeping a sourdough culture (called Clint Yeastwood) in my fridge and each weekend I try something different to get me that little bit closer to perfection.
|
|
|
What’s your favourite film of all time and why?
I’d like to say something by Christopher Nolan as I enjoy films that make you think or give you something unexpected. But honestly, I would have to say my favourite film of all time is Superbad. There’s never a time when I wouldn’t want to watch it and it’s the film my friends and I quote to each other all the time. I must have seen it more than ten times.
What’s your favourite place to visit?
I love going to Holkham on the North Norfolk coast for many reasons. I’ve always found looking out at the sea incredibly calming, so it’s the go to place for me when I feel stressed and run down. The beach there is so vast and, for most of the year, deserted that it’s one of the few places you can get lost for a moment and feel like the only person for miles around. There’s one café as you walk up to the beach and that’s it, no shops or restaurants just miles of sand and sea. It holds wonderful memories too as it’s the place where my wife and I got engaged three years ago.
Tell us your favourite joke
From one of my favourite comedians Bob Mortimer and his podcast Athletico Mince:
I went to the local video shop and said could I borrow Batman Forever? He said, no you have to bring it back tomorrow.
|
|
SPOTLIGHT ON - SMB COLLEGE GROUP AND COLCHESTER INSTITUTE
This month we have a double helping of our popular 'Spotlight On' section. Our first piece focuses on the recently formed SMB College Group, including their exciting new collaborative partnership with leading UK-based Sports Agency, Future Elite Sports. In our second piece, we hear from Nils Franke, Dean of Higher Education at University Centre Colchester, who sees a connection between the institution’s historical development and how the current pandemic may once again bring about change.
|
|
|
Established in 2020, SMB College Group is formed of two merged Colleges – Stephenson College and Brooksby Melton College - and their commercial entities. Our purpose is to improve opportunities for our students, underpinned by a commitment to excellence, innovation and inclusion. Our aim is to create a first-class College Group, which speaks with one powerful and strategic voice, retaining deep roots in the local communities it serves. This combination of local access to skills development within a strategic regional framework is at the heart of what we do.
The positive, ethical culture of the merged colleges builds upon strong and effective collaboration with all key stakeholders, including local authorities, Local Enterprise Partnerships, schools, universities, employers and community groups. SMB College Group works closely with industry partners to ensure it provides the workforce skills needed now and for the future. Our students access high-quality learning and teaching in some excellent facilities with industry-standard resources and exceptional staff. This supports each student to achieve their full potential and contribute to sustainable economic growth and a thriving community. By working together, SMB College Group delivers an accessible and coherent curriculum to support the development of skills using an efficient and financially sustainable model, delivering positive outcomes for students.
|
|
|
SMB College Group has recently launched an exciting collaborative partnership with leading UK-based Sports Agency, Future Elite Sports. Future Elite Sports focus on providing opportunities in sport for students wishing to study at higher education level. Students receive top level coaching with the aim of
|
|
|
|
progressing into a higher level of football whilst simultaneously studying for a Sports Science Degree. They have a full-time timetable which includes lectures, strength and conditioning sessions, coaching, matches and analysis review sessions. Students have the option of staying in
|
|
|
accommodation on the beautiful 850 acre estate at the Brooksby Campus, where all aspects of their programme are of walking distance including a strength and conditioning gym, two grass pitches, a sports science lab, a sports hall and a 3G pitch.
James Thorne, Director of Curriculum at SMB College Group, stated ‘This will provide students with dual opportunities in the sport they are passionate about and within education, learning from high level football and gaining a Sports Science degree to develop both educationally and within football. This should encourage, and instil motivation into, students who may not have typically progressed onto a University course’.
Students who enrol onto this programme will have access to full-time UEFA qualified coaches, strength and conditioning programmes, and analysis sessions providing an environment similar to that of a high level academy that focuses on developing and nurturing talent. The Sports Science degree allows students the opportunity to gain a wide range of knowledge before choosing a specific focus area in their final year of study, either within Performance Analysis and Coaching or Strength and Conditioning. This can be closely linked with their experience of high level coaching through Future Elite Sports, with the elite sport culture helping the learning and teaching come to life.
In addition, students will gain opportunities to gain industry experience with external clubs and organisations, allowing them to become well-rounded, employable graduates. Moreover, students will have access to playing opportunities both in the UK and overseas – with the latter being through graduate soccer scholarship opportunities in America. This will be offered as an exit route for students who may wish to progress into postgraduate study abroad. These students will be those who have applied themselves well to the education side of the programme, as well as shown good footballing ability.
The course appears to be very popular with the first intake of students on the programme set for 2021, and over 30 current applicants from across the country.
|
|
I can’t imagine why one might want to do that, but let’s assume for a moment that the script for Monty Python’s Life of Brian is re-written and set in Victorian times. The famous line about Rome’s political and social legacy would become ‘what have the Victorians ever done for us?’
In the case of Colchester, as for many other educational institutions up and down the country, our roots are based on an (initially) private training initiative, many of which have today grown into larger-scale organisations in the UK, including conservatoires and universities. In the 1880s a group of artists left London to set up the Albert School of Art in North Essex, which, at the arrival of World War One, needed a bit of a re-branding exercise and became the Colchester School of Art. Fast forward by another 30-40 years, and the School had moved premises, merged with the North Essex Teacher Training College, subsequently becoming Colchester Institute. Its national reputation for Music in the 1980s and early 90s changed again through organisational developments that responded to new funding streams. This in turn led to a stronger regional profile for Further Education courses whilst always retaining a degree level provision amongst its programmes. In 2016, the then Department for Business, Industry and Skills (BIS) gave permission for all degree courses to be grouped together in the newly formed University Centre Colchester, as part of Colchester Institute. The institutional validation of Colchester by UEA in late 2018 was the beginning of an 18 -month process in which all our courses were re-written, some discontinued and others introduced. It enabled us to give programmes some distinctive features that go across subject areas and therefore introduce a ‘Colchester element’ to our provision. By 2021 all degree courses had been re-organised in three Schools: Applied Technologies, Social Sciences and Visual & Performing Arts.
So much for the past, but what about the future? It may seem odd to spend time attempting to anticipate future developments in the sector, not least when successive governments have tried, and will probably continue, to reinvent the wheel. What the pace and nature of past institutional change evidences is that they have followed political and technological developments, but at a time delay. Both are now faster evolving than it was possible in a pre-digital age, and therein lies the growing need for Higher Education institutions to learn to anticipate, rather than react. For example, pre-pandemic the sector has had a long attachment to detailed four or five year strategic planning cycles. Now it seems that the operational necessities and experiences of the past year, rather than more aspirational aims, are beginning to drive strategic thinking.
If one accepts the above as valid observations, the implications for Higher Education can be far reaching, ranging from questioning the direction of some subject areas to acknowledging future student demand for shorter, accredited training opportunities and understanding the changing staff community in a Higher Education organisation. For example, pre-Covid, all our academic and administrative staff lived close-by. As practices and expectations amongst students and staff changed during the pandemic, we appointed two colleagues who live further afield and thus only teach online. It enabled us to seek out particular expertise, which enriched the student experience, and seemed a logical step to take at the time.
Now we are planning for returning to more on-campus working, but carrying forward a flexible approach to delivery (much welcomed by students who are in employment themselves), and it seems that the enforced period of online teaching and learning from March to June 2020 has changed expectations and experiences amongst staff and students, maybe just as fundamentally as institutional mergers or relocations have done in the past.
It appears possible, if not probable, that a flexible curriculum delivery could result in two different types of academic workloads: those who work on campus and online, and those who only work online. It means that staff recruitment and workloads may change, that some elements of the curriculum could become far more specialised than before, and that as an organisation we will have to re-think our operational practices to make them more accessible for colleagues who can’t just pop into an office next door, or who may never actually set foot on our campus.
Just over a year ago it would have seemed far-fetched for organisations such as University Centre Colchester to think that within two or three years a tangible percentage of its Higher Education staff may no longer work on campus, and that students would be accepting of building different working relationships with staff, depending on what they teach.
As the concept of education became an increasingly important issue during the Victorian period, and the politically driven democratisation of learning took centre stage from the 1950s onwards, I am wondering whether the fundamental shifts in Higher Education post pandemic will in future be viewed as a similarly decisive development in educational practices. There is just one question: given the rapid changes of our time, will the need for a future staffing structure be here next academic year already?
|
|
|
|
