Evaluation of organisation-wide student support services
Student support services are important in providing specialist academic and/or pastoral guidance to students beyond the expertise of the teachers. In this way they assist in student retention in and successful completion of a programme.
For two polytechnics in Aotearoa/New Zealand I analysed the effectiveness of their organisation-wide student support services and made recommendations for the future. In my view student support services should be considered as an integrated part of a programme, not as an add-on. If programme teachers and student support services work as a team there is an opportunity for both to learn from each other and extend their respective areas of expertise for the benefit of helping their students.
In order to develop an organisational vision of student support services and how these services should be organised within this vision I created an analysis framework based on scholarly literature in this field. I subsequently collected the experiences and views of people directly or indirectly involved with student support services in the organisation, as well as issues they had come across in their practices and solutions they proposed. The analysis framework was used to interpret the data from a holistic perspective and helped identify the strengths of current practices and areas for improvement. The findings were reported to each organisation, including recommendations for their consideration.