Key Areas - Student Services

The Context

Driving forward the Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning agenda does not simply involve promoting access opportunities and providing high quality teaching and learning. It also raises important issues of student support. Universities and colleges need to ensure that student support arrangements are appropriate for mature as well as younger students, whatever their mode of study or their gender, social or cultural background.

For this reason, the range of support facilities offered by student services departments has escalated during the last ten years. Whilst successful students need to take responsibility for their own learning, student retention and achievement rates are considerably improved when institutions provide excellent support with study skills, finance, welfare, child care, counselling, religion, careers, accommodation, sport, recreation and a wide range of disability issues.

What role does FACE Play?

FACE recognises the importance of Student Services for supporting the learner and notes the good work of AMOSSHE (The Association of Managers of Student Services in Higher Education). FACE complements AMOSSHE’s work, by providing a network and facilitating debate on effective student support amongst a wide spectrum of policy makers and practitioners, both academic and support staff. The editor of the FACE to FACE Bulletin ran a series of articles on innovations and best practice in Student Services and, during the last five years, there have been a number of papers at the FACE Annual Conference exploring specific aspects of student support. Topics have included developing effective support for disabled students, raising the employability of minority ethnic students and promoting appropriate learning skill support.

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