Mind the gap – is your institution missing opportunities with wellbeing data?
To succeed, HE leaders must ensure data is put at the heart of student services provision, said Government advisor Professor Edward Peck CBE in a special report published this spring. We asked a panel of experts for their take on his answer to delivering more scalable and responsive wellbeing solutions.
Better student wellbeing and reduced pressure on student services is within the sector’s grasp and data is the key, the Government’s Higher Education Student Support Champion told providers this spring.
Professor Edward Peck CBE published his report Student analytics - A core specification for engagement and wellbeing analytics, following a pilot project with the University of Northumbria supported by the Office for Students.
Professor Peck, the Vice Chancellor of Nottingham Trent University, outlined a vision where better governance and understanding of commonly held data could bring a breakthrough across the board.
The report showed how through improved analytics of data already being collected by the university, resources were targeted more effectively with better outcomes for students. The pilot also lowered the strain on Northumbria’s student services department.
Professor Peck’s vision was that ‘student analytics done well puts the human experience to the fore and helps ensure the valuable but finite resource of traditional student support services can be made sustainable’.
Higher education mental health expert Géraldine Dufour says her own experience on the ground echoed Professor Peck’s findings. She saw this in practice in her work at Cambridge University over several years.
“As a Head of Service it also helped me make a business case to put resources where I knew they were needed.
“So, for instance if you saw that there were wellbeing issues for a particular group, you would know that there was a need to liaise and do some joint working around that particular group.”
“We also know that students with mental health issues don’t always achieve degrees or stay at university, so the data is showing you that this is a group of students that you really need to help.”
Géraldine Duffour
The importance of good quality data
Géraldine was a founder member of the Student Counselling Outcomes Research and Evaluation (SCORE) consortium at the University of Sheffield, to create a shared routine outcomes database to provide evidence for the sector and to improve service delivery. She is interested in changes to the National Student Survey (NSS) which will see new additional questions on freedom of expression and mental wellbeing underlining the importance of these issues.
“Sharing and analysing data collected routinely by counselling services will enable a new level of understanding that it is impossible to achieve with data from a single service.”
She says such analysis will inform the development of the right tools and support the evidence base for student counselling.
“I think it is really key that we have good wellbeing data. Once you start looking at big numbers, you start noticing trends that are difficult to pick up when you are looking at only a small number of students. Data also helps you understand, triggers for stress, for example the transition in and out of university.
“It also helps ensure you are able to monitor and improve service provision. I am working with a university at the moment that provides very good online counselling services however 60% of their students wanting counselling support, are waiting for a face-to-face appointment, so the data is telling us that just because you have a good online service, it’s not what people want all of the time.”
A shift from reactive to proactive
On the accommodation side, for Simon Barlow, Residential Marketing and Communications Manager, Queen Mary University of London, improving flow of wellbeing data would be a key step in assisting in supporting individual students as an additional resource for staff teams. One way the accommodation team is planning to do this is through Kinetic's student wellbeing platform, Student Life.
Simon agrees with Professor Peck that data can be used to enable university teams to deliver more scalable and responsive solutions at every level:
“Whereas residential teams might have intervened with a student because of a problem on the discipline side and then later found they had not been attending lectures or had been engaging with the Advice and Counselling Service, there is a move to weekly meetings and case conferences but with more data there would be potential to be more proactive than reactive.”
“We are not huge in terms of the number of residents that we have, with 3000 in halls on campus in all, and we have that data sharing challenge unlike for universities with private providers where there are agreements in place. If you haven’t got a data sharing agreement, you can’t share much. Having that data and those agreements in place would help focus the attention of the team in terms of individual cases.”
At Cardiff University wellbeing data is central to conversations taking place both within the university and externally, according to the university’s Director of Student Life, Ben Lewis.
He explains: “Within Cardiff University we invested significantly in improving our data through developing the Centre for Student Life programme. I have a dedicated Service Improvement Manager whose reporting informs what we decide to do in the future and is a core part of managing the provision at Cardiff. That data role is important and then we've also invested in new software for case management inquiry management purposes, so I will see reports on how many inquiries are being opened and closed in the chat bot and how many inquiries are being opened and closed in the inquiry service online. That sort of detail wasn't there before.”
Agile solutions
Data is enabling Ben and his team to be more flexible and agile in the provision of its services, but he accepts that the built environment – Cardiff University’s new Centre for Student Life – offers unique opportunities.
“We're also using data to model when services are available. Looking at where we can perhaps manage one to one volume down by offering groups for issues that are coming up in a more common way.
“And again, we've designed the built environment and the online environment for people to do things quite quickly for university. So, we can put on new workshop programming in response to a volume increase in demand quite easily.”
Ben concludes that while Professor Peck’s report was aimed at English universities, he supports the direction of travel across the HE sector.
“I agree totally with Professor Peck’s perspective, because obviously, in the same way as in the NHS, there is a need to put patient data ahead of clinical services to make the best use of your resources, and I suppose that's what we've already done in Cardiff, and you can go further with that again, using learning analytics and how you link that to student services as well.”
Ben argues that to achieve sector-wide data gains, there are some barriers which are down to the different paths each institution takes.
He says: “One of the things that's difficult is that all universities style these things slightly differently. So, you do have the barrier of a lack of a common language in terms of how you approach things, but in principle Professor Peck’s vision mirrors exactly what we have been doing at Cardiff.”
A joined-up approach to mental health
Wellbeing data is also key to improving links with external providers, according to Ben; “There is work to be done both with the NHS, with A&E departments and local health care around connecting and sharing data.
“In South Wales, we have a data sharing agreement with Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, which enables information to flow back and forth about mental health presentations. And I guess that is one model for the way forward in terms of improving data sharing as that flow ultimately is in the best interests of the student, assuming they have given consent for it to happen.”
It’s also about improving coordination with the NHS provision of mental health for students, says Géraldine.
“There is always room for more joint working, but it is also about the capacity for this as joint working takes time.”
It is clear that as well as universities, key sector bodies are also part of the landscape and vision Professor Peck outlined in driving data at the heart of wellbeing.
UCAS has reported that over the past decade, there has been a 450% increase in student mental health declarations. UCAS acknowledges there is much more to be done particularly in highlighting the support available to students. In a paper asking whether student mental health is being properly supported, the Office for Students showed how it had used its access and participation data to highlight substantial gaps in student outcomes and areas of concern for universities and colleges.
Clearly our experts too are seeing the results but also the potential of understanding and using the numbers to manage resources and provide better support. There is a need for ease of use in capturing the data but also solutions to secure and share sensitive data in the way needed to deliver the right interventions and outcomes.
You can find out more about Student Life, Kinetic's software for managing student wellbeing here.