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Understanding the Value and Impact of Services that Support Students

AMOSSHE is delighted to announce that we have been awarded £73,000 from the HEFCE LGM fund towards a national project looking at the value and impact of student services.  The project will run for 15 months, and result in a publicly available toolkit that higher education institutions (HEIs) can use to measure and benchmark their services.  The project has wide sector support from universities and sector bodies such as AHUA, AUA, BUFDG, ECU, GuildHE and the NUS.  UUK has been key in championing the work.

The project will develop a holistic approach to understanding and evaluating the value and impact of services that support students.  It will:
• identify meaningful ways to measure and demonstrate the impact and value of services in HEIs
• develop potential measures and pilot them in at least four HEIs
• produce and disseminate tools and techniques to measure value and impact of services.

Outputs will:
• include a toolkit offering a basket of approaches to evaluation
• improve universities’ understanding of  the value of their support services
• increase efficiency and professionalism
• improve the quality of services and the student experience.

The timeline for the project is:
• Literature review June 2010
• Development phase July 2010 – September 2010
• Pilot phase October 2010 - February 2011
• Toolkit and final report May 2011
• Dissemination of outputs, and launch events June 2011
Representatives from the project team at CHERI (the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information) will present the findings of the literature review at the 2010 AMOSSHE annual conference.

This is a critical and timely project that will give student services professionals greater evidence about the value of their service, and improved mechanisms to evaluate and promote their departments within HE governance.  We are excited to be working with CHERI and have HEFCE’s support in this venture, and look forward to sharing more with you about the project as it develops.