PARs Implementation

Q: What are PARs?

A: Personal and Academic Records (PARs) are dual record systems developed by staff and students working together. They relate to a key set of activities and they record, for the benefit of both staff and students, the academic and personal development of individual students and the processes by which a department guides and supports student progress.

There is no one single institutional PAR which everyone will use. Each School/department designs its own PAR within guidelines, customising existing examples to meet its own needs. The hope is that staff and students in each School/department will participate in deciding how the concept is best customised for their discipline.

PARs are generally designed to fulfil three important functions at the same time:

1. to maximise students' academic achievement and skills/career development
   
2. to streamline student-related admin for academics, by integrating a range of activities into a effective system which makes the most of scarce tutorial time
   
3. to encourage students to reflect upon and take increasing responsibility for their own learning and personal development
   

Schools/Departments

• collect information about each student's progress through their course - useful for reference writing
• support their students in making module choices, reviewing their academic performance, etc
• have regular contact with all their students and make a positive input into their personal development on an individual basis

Students

• discuss their overall academic performance with a tutor at regular, helpful intervals - so that opportunities for enhancing achievement are not missed
• are encouraged to chose and plan extracurricular activities, vacation work, part-time jobs, so as to maximise their development of life skills and enhance their employability
• build up a personal profile - useful for writing CVs and applications for jobs or further study.

Q: In October 2001, how extensively are we introducing PARs?

A: The minimum requirement is that PARs are provided for all first year undergraduates, single and joint honours, full-time and part-time.

Q: How recent is the PARs scheme?

A: There have been PARs schemes at Nottingham since 1993. PARs were taken up on a voluntary basis by course teams in seventeen disciplines before 1998, when proposals for institution-wide implementation by 2001 were announced. Taking forward the University policy, which had been approved by Senate in the normal way, Teaching Committee delegated the direction of PARs implementation to a subgroup, the PARs Implementation Group, which first met in October 1999 and held an information event for all Heads of School in May 2000. At that point several Schools already had a PARs scheme in use by one or more year groups and since then the remaining Schools have been offered support to develop PARs schemes of their own.

Q: Are other Universities doing something similar?

A: Yes, similar schemes are already under development in many other universities, including Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Reading and Birmingham. The whole HE sector, however, is subject to a national policy recommendation by UUK (May 2000) to adopt Progress File (transcripts + supported processes for personal development planning) for all students, including postgraduates, by 2005 (see:http://www.qaa.ac.uk/crntwork/profileHE/guidelines/policystatement/contents.htm). A series of national events is being held in Autumn 2001 bringing together universities which already have some experience in this area with those which do not, to help the slower institutions to get up to speed. The Newcastle-Nottingham Internet-PARs Project is funded by DfES/HEFCE to contribute to this process in the period 2000-02.

Personal development planning (PDP) is seen as important for the whole sector because of its educational benefits in helping students to become more effective independent learners. It also has potential to support the work of Schools in other key areas: benchmarking, skills development, programme specifications, widening participation, pastoral care.

Q: Are all universities taking a standard approach and is there a standard approach at Nottingham?

A:On transcripts, the aim is to agree a sector-wide standard. With personal development planning, however, there is more than one possible approach and the UUK policy leaves it to individual universities to choose the means, as long as the end is achieved. For example, PDP can be embedded within the academic curriculum, especially in project and dissertation modules, but it is a major challenge by this route to meet the policy requirement that all students have access to PDP at all stages of their course. By contrast, effective personal tutoring systems, underpinned by PARs schemes, will provide sustained PDP opportunities for every student. The University policy framework for PARs is set out in the Quality Manual. It is not intended to sweep away Schools' existing good practice; on the contrary, Schools have been encouraged to preserve their good practice and to build upon it, customising the PARs concept so that it fits in with the academic needs and preferences of staff and students.

Q: Are other universities developing electronic systems?

A:Yes, Newcastle is currently piloting a system related to ePARs in one faculty. Bangor has a web-based tool, Oxford Brookes is building one and King's College, London, plans to have one.

Q: When is this University going to go electronic with PARs?

A: The University is currently supporting a small number of pilot schemes to help develop a web-based version of PARs (ePARs) which will interact with SATURN. The prototype has been developed at Nottingham and Newcastle universities with DfEE funding and is, to the best of our knowledge, the most advanced model in the field. The further development of this model will need to be completed satisfactorily before it is opened to wider use at Nottingham. There has been no policy decision to impose the ePARs system across the University.

At the same time, informed opinion is that the future for this kind of recording - in employment as well as in all sectors of education - lies with web-based systems. The hope is that Nottingham's ePARs will be available for Schools on an opt-in basis in the medium term, perhaps from October 2002.

Q. What are the main lessons of implementation at Nottingham so far?

A:

• The importance of customising - led by Schools' PARs Co-ordinators, who have developed their Schools' PARs, including deciding the timing/number of meetings, agendas, detail of developmental work for students.
• The importance of embracing existing good practice.
• Some schools needed to change the culture of their personal tutoring from problem-focused (providing for a minority of students) to proactive support for all students (maximising success, not just dealing with problems).
• The need for clear collaboration with support services - especially defining roles of academics. Schools and the support services (e.g. Counselling and CAS). A sub-group of Teaching Committee and Student Affairs Committee has been set up to report on this by the summer of 2002.
• Attitudes of staff frequently influence the attitudes of their students.
• There is a need for a culture change amongst students - a need to promote a more proactive approach to personal tutorials on the student's part. It is helpful to define the roles and responsibilities of tutor and tutee in the tutorial process clearly at the start and remind if necessary.
• Effectiveness is increased by an imaginative and flexible approach to the timing of meetings - eg some Schools now offer 'progress check' meetings around Christmas/ pre-exams, and some do not have end of year meetings

Educational benefits of PARs schemes so far identified in some Schools include:

• They help students to become more 'reflective practitioners'; able to reflect critically themselves on their own achievement and development, articulate their reflections and plan their future work constructively, e.g. module/project choices.
• They help students view their learning across the whole programme rather than module or semester.
• They provide an opportunity to encourage students to take a longer term, more in-depth view of their education, helping with such things as choice of dissertation subject and discouraging students from becoming too assessment driven.

Samples of problem-solving in some Schools:

• Problem of low student attendance at end of year meeting: meeting moved to the start of the following year, with reactive support retained at year end for students with problem exam results.
• Need to simplify paperwork: purpose and use of forms clarified to streamline process and eliminate all duplication; practical problem of photocopying forms solved by use of NCR (no carbon required) paper.
• Low level of student interest in certain meetings: scheduling and agendas evaluated and adjusted to make them more relevant and timely
• Students rather passive, not realising that they need to engage actively in the tutorial process in other to receive benefit from it: roles and responsibilities of tutor and tutee explained to all; student preparation for each tutorial increased, with guidance; involvement of CAS/employers reinforced the importance of students' ownership of own personal development and planning, and the value to employers of the skill of self-management.

Q: Why are we implementing PARs across the whole University?

A: Several schools have already opted into the PARs scheme on a voluntary basis. Many have found PARs an advantage in the face of QA subject review. More generally, PARs provide an effective underpinning for the quality of personal tutoring and have the potential to help with the development of students' skills and other policy moves in learning and teaching, such as subject benchmarking, following from the Dearing report on Higher Education. Summer 2000 will see the announcement of national policy on transcripts and personal development planning in Higher Education. With PARs, Nottingham is providing a lead in this area.

In implementing PARs we are not simply putting in place administrative processes for recording student achievement but reviewing the relationship between academic staff and students, especially the contribution of personal tutors to students' progress and development. The main emphasis falls not on the records themselves but on the high quality activities through which staff and students address issues of individual student development. The outcomes of these activities are captured as the core content of the records.

Q: Are PARs a completely new, additional task for schools to undertake?

A: No. For most schools, the task will be one of consolidating what they have been doing for many years in providing academic support and guidance for their students. Where schools already have a pro-active approach to guiding student progress and development, some will need to focus on choosing which of their current procedures to make standard, others to streamline hitherto separate processes into one coherent scheme, or improve their documentation.

For a school which up to now has had a reactive, mainly student-problems-centred culture of personal tutoring, time needs putting into the preparation and design phase of a pro-active PAR scheme which will involve all students, with input from students and as many staff as possible. Even so, many of the activities to be integrated within the PAR will already exist in some form in the school. The task is to bring them together and build a comprehensive and efficient scheme. Practical consultation with the PADSHE team, including CAS colleagues, is recommended to save work.

PARs schemes need academic input to define and update the tutor-student processes. In several schools where PARs now operate, administrators or secretaries organise the running of them week to week.

Q: Does operating a PAR scheme mean a net increase in the workloads of academic staff?

A: It depends what you have in place already and how much time academic staff are used to spending on academic feedback, student guidance, one-to-one support and administrative tasks involving students.

The outcome of implementing PARs in a school should be a clear structure of support for student development on an individual basis:

• to which all students have equal access
• which defines and contains tutors' responsibilities
• which maximises student confidence in the quality of the formal tutoring system and minimises unscheduled student encroachments on staff time.

A common pattern adopted by a number of schools which already operate PARs is based on a short one-to-one meeting, three times per year, between the personal tutor and an average of twenty personal tutees. Some schools allocate certain selected activities to group meetings rather than to one-to-one tutorials.

Q: How can completing a record form for a personal tutorial enhance, rather than detract from, the quality of the one-to-one personal interaction between tutor and student?

A: If personal tutorials turn into form-filling sessions, we will have lost a lot. This is not the intention. The record should not be the central purpose of the tutorial.

The record form should include a basic agenda to provide a default structure for each scheduled tutorial, to guarantee that a common set of points is covered for all students. This is the quality assurance element in the system. A tutorial might start from the agenda and return to it at the end to complete the record, but the quality of the discussion which comes in between is the crucial part.

At the same time, the partnership of tutor and tutee in recording the outcome of that discussion is very helpful in three ways:

• it documents the effectiveness of the schools' personal tutoring for QA purposes
• it clarifies aspects of the student's performance on the course in such a way as to enable them to go away and make progress (compare best use of records of research supervisions)
• it ensures that both tutor and tutee have the same clear view of the outcomes of their meeting.

Q: What about Joint Honours students? Do they have two PARs, one in each discipline?

A: In the first instance, staff are encouraged to focus on designing a PAR scheme to suit their own individual discipline. Approaches to PARs for Joint Honours students will need to be discussed between relevant Schools. Possible models would include:

• two PAR schemes and documents, with two personal tutors per student
• one PAR scheme and document developed by the student and two personal tutors, one in each discipline
• one PAR document, one personal tutor in one discipline to conduct regular overviews of the student's overall progress, with an academic appointed in the other discipline to be available to advise the student on issues specific to that subject.

The PARs Implementation Group (PARsIG) will develop guidance on this.

Q: The emphasis on Schools' being able to customise the PARs concept to accommodate distinctive demands of their disciplines is very welcome, but is there a required core? What is the balance between customisation and standardisation? Are PARs going to be quality-controlled?

A: The core components of PARs, as currently defined, are set out in the information on the PADSHE website (www.nottingham.ac.uk/padshe), under Guidelines for Departments. These have been in existence for three sessions, used by the pilot Schools, and at its meeting in June 2000 Teaching Committee will be asked to confirm that these are now University policy, and will be added to our set of requirements set out in the Quality Manual. During 2000/01 University Quality Audit will ask about progress on implementation, in the expectation that from October 2001 UQA will include adherence to the University's PARs policy as part of its remit.

Q: Are there PARs available to work from and can some key documents be supplied to us on disk or by email so that we can edit them?

A: Yes. The following schools/departments have agreed to make their PARs available:
Biological Sciences, Classics, Education: PGCE, English, Law, Mathematics, Nursing, Physics, Physiotherapy, Politics, Psychology, Urban Planning.

Hard copies are available for consultation and/or photocopying:

• from your faculty PAR rep
• in the ATLAS Resources Room in the Teaching Enhancement Office, Jubilee Campus
• from the PADSHE Project Team: please email padshe@nottingham.ac.uk

In addition, copies of the above PARs are being placed on the PADSHE website (www.nottingham.ac.uk/padshe) in a downloadable form.

Q: What other practical help is available to schools for PARs development?

A: PARsIG has set up a central support team:

1. A project manager, Justine Murrin (justine.murrin@nottingham.ac.uk), has been appointed to help schools with implementation. She is available to
           - run workshops with staff and students
           - give practical advice on implementation
           - offer advice and comment on customised PARs
           - facilitate networking between schools in different faculties which are at the same stage of implementation.
2. The Careers Advisory Service will be able to discuss with schools ways in which e.g. skills audits/career planning/careers liaison can be integrated into the design of their PAR processes. Schools should contact their designated Careers Adviser.
3. The Training and Staff Development Unit will offer centralised workshops for Schools' PAR co-ordinators on designing and implementing PARs and may also be able to provide customised workshops for individual Schools where particular needs are identified.
4. School and Faculty based support is also available. Each School has an identified PAR co-ordinator (a SPARC) and each Faculty will have a Faculty co-ordinator who will facilitate networking on PARs development for SPARCs on a faculty basis, give feedback to PARsIG on developments in the Faculty through membership of the Teaching Innovation Subgroup.

Q: How much do PARs cost and what financial support is available to schools for PARs development?

A: Costs arise from providing all students with folders or files containing their copies of the school's PAR documents. All the materials required for one complete PAR folder per student, per three-year undergraduate course, cost a few pounds: probably between four and eight, depending on the quality of presentation preferred. The core documents need to be produced in duplicate: one copy for the student, one for the tutor/School.

Financial support for materials:

• In special cases, schools may apply for Teaching Enhancement Office funding to cover start-up costs.
• Schools may wish to consider sponsorship. Businesses interested in our students find PARs an attractive sponsorship opportunity. Sponsorships are already in place for the PARs in the Business School and the School of Law. For further information, please contact Justine Murrin.

Financial support for staff training:

• All Schools' Staff Development Officers and Heads of School will receive invitations in October 2000 to apply for funding for School training projects, planned for the 2000/01 session. Proposals for awaydays on PARs implementation would be very appropriate. In a special case, it may be possible to apply for funding outside this scheme. Please contact Michael Davidson in the TSDU (michael.davidson@nottingham.ac.uk).

Q: If ePARs are coming sooner or later, is it worthwhile developing paper-based ones now?

A: Yes. Like the paper-based PARs, ePARs are a concept, not a prescribed system. The kind of customisation possible with the paper version is accommodated within the electronic version. This means that:

• the academic policy decisions required to develop a PAR in a School are the same whether the medium is paper or IT
• it will be perfectly feasible to transfer the features of a customised paper PAR into IT.

Experience so far shows that the key to the quality of PAR systems is the defining and handling of the processes involved for staff and students, and that these are often thought through more satisfactorily on paper than in IT form. Unless educational principles are firmly fixed beforehand, the data-crunching to which IT lends itself can easily dictate and over-dominate the content of an ePAR.