How are we shaping the future of Student wellbeing management?
In honour of Mental Health Awareness week 2022, we’re reflecting on a development journey that has brought us Student Life, a system that is helping institutions in the HE sector to record, monitor and report on student wellbeing.
At the ASRA 2022 conference, we delivered a presentation outlining Student Life and how a growing number of our customer base are embedding these features into their day to day student support processes.
We caught up with our Head of Customer Success, Romy Burgess, to find out the key elements and takeaways from this presentation.
What is Student Life?
What we found was a set of challenges faced by institutions far and wide – a lack of secure management of student data and limited sharing of data between different student facing teams. Such management of wellbeing data has resulted in there being no single source of truth and different departments relying on varying methods for recording and tracking such data, often leaving room for potential data breaches or exposure of sensitive information.
Kinetic’s Student Life can tackle such issues by providing a central and secure location for storing sensitive student data and providing critical reporting tools to track the number of incidents occurring across the academic year.
Student Life is a result of extensive investigation, research and discovery with our customer base to understand how conversations and on campus events involving students were being captured and shared between teams.
Why have we developed Student Life?
We’re all too familiar with the statistics surrounding mental health within the HE sector and these have only been exasperated by the COVID pandemic over the past 2 years.
Stat 1:
In the last 10 years, the number of students disclosing their mental health issues has grown by 450% (UCAS)
Stat 2:
One UK student dies by suicide every 4 days (ONS)
Statistics such as these illustrate the importance of implementing a proactive approach to providing students with the support they need, such as signposting to resources and having a single location for recording all student interactions and other indicators of mental health and wellbeing.
Without recording such key indicators in a central location, teams lack a full picture of a student’s wellbeing and crucial pieces of the puzzle are missing.
Our Customers
Student Life began with a “Special Interest Group” made up of 6 Kinetic customers who meet at key points of the year to share best practice and feedback, which is ultimately shaping the future of the product.
One member of the SIG is the University of Liverpool, where Accommodation Manager Katy Lemmon observed the following internal changes following the implementation of Student Life:
“The culture change was challenging, as convincing staff to move away from email was difficult, but the system sold itself as the ability to have a holistic view of a student’s profile and incidents they had been involved with was incredibly beneficial.
It provided us an opportunity to offer early intervention, pick up on patterns of behaviour and action support earlier than we have been able to before”
A number of different teams across the University are using the system in varying ways and adding a combined total of around ~200 Incidents a month, each of which are carefully categorised to ensure effective triage and reporting can take place.
Looking Ahead
Student Life continues to develop with each new product release and can transform your management of student wellbeing by introducing more intuitive tools to track key indicators of wellbeing and help you to tailor the support provided to your students.
Interested to learn more about Student Life? Take a look at our dedicated product page.
Alternatively, you can contact an Account Manager.