The impact of personal tutoring on students and staff.

Two sides to every coin

Introducing Augustus et al

Augustus et al (2023)

IMAGE: Paper header

Aim: “to establish how well-equipped PATs were to fulfil their role supporting students”.

Interviews followed by a qualitative thematic analysis of responses “focused on looking for issues of significance to the participants”.

“The high number of respondents willing to participate in the reserach may demonstrate a need for a forum in which PATs can voice concerns”

Study recruitment and eligibility criteria

Study recruited participants from across a “medium sized University in the West Midlands”

“participants needed to be a full-time university lecturer and have been a PAT for at least a year”.

Poses a sample frame issue
- part-time and teaching-focused staff are more likely to be early career, women or BAME
- each of these is likely to influence the experience of a personal tutor.
Opt-in selection bias would over-represent tutors with negative experiences

Findings

Self

self as context
past transferable experience
boundaries

Others / Systems

mental health
deployment and workload
systems and support

Resilience

burden, tiredness and accumulation
experience, age, boundaries and networks

Expectations and Boundaries

‘real blurring of a professional relationship between students, now email me at all times weekends and evenings you know I need to contact you urgently and I don’t have to respond bith there is an innate pressure’ - Participant 1

“PATs hold strong opinions of how the PAT should be done, often suggestiong that their way is right and that the approach of others is wrong, with the other doing too much or too little”

Mental Health

YouGov poll (2016) found 1 in 4 HE students dealing with mental health difficulties, 3/4 of those anxiety or depression.

PAT as unqualified counsellor:

“I’m not a counsellor or a marriage counsellor and it might be worrying if people are given bad advice but thing I’m giving good advice.” - Participant 9

“The waiting time for counselling is 14 weeks which is not good and really hard to tell students in need” - Participant 2

Having the time for each tuttee

“not necessarily an issue of being overworked, rather it is the immediacy of the required response, due to the humanness of the relationship”

“We are kind of glad if they don’t turn up, if all the students I have turned up I would not be able to cope.” - Participant 4

“I enjoy getting to know students individually, building relationships with then , spending time with them. I really like that part of the job. I wouldn’t want to not do that job even though the occasional one really gets to you.” - Participant 2

Managing emotional and energy

Implicit assumption that all staff experience similar demand and are equally capable of managing the emotional toll of PAT work.

“there are times when I don’t feel very resilient… we’ve had some personal difficulties at home… work was a bit of a sanctuary but I carried this emotion around with me.” - Participant 27

“I have a work ethic that I recently addressed because I was doing far too much and it was affecting me mentally” - Participant 3

“If I did 4 tutorials with 30 students that would take almost a week” - Participant 13

Recommendations / Conclusions

They found there to be a desire and a need for PAT training
Not only initial training but ongoing support and CPD
Acknowledge that mandating this is not necessarily the way to go.

Individual supervision (mentor/teaching buddy) as a tool for mitigating burden and promoting resilience.

Workplace resilience training to improve well-being and productivity.

Thank you, have some questions

Is there a difference in your perceived confidence or competence depending on the issues brought to you by students?

What strategies do you have to reduce the emotional burden [of PAT work]?

Build Information

R version 4.3.3 (2024-02-29)

Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)

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