Senior Tutor’s Report

REPORT BY DR JANE GREATOREX

The past academic year has been a whirlwind of new initiatives, new staff and of course, we had to adapt to incredibly difficult circumstances. The educational and support focus was around preparing the College for the 2021 intake whilst improving and maintaining the teaching and welfare support for the current cohort of students. Much has been achieved and learnt despite all.

Before the start of term, we successfully ran our first ever, fully inclusive, Bridging Week for all our first-year undergraduate students. It aimed to help attendees settle into student and college life from both a social and academic perspective and familiarise themselves with their surroundings. The concept has been expanded and adapted due to Covid-19 but also with improvements for 2021 in mind.

Following last year’s success, we chose a new theme for this academic year, Connections on which we based a few of our talks preceding Formal Hall in the first term. We held a Connections event, in partnership with AstraZeneca, a unique project that brought together scientists, poets, school children, students and the general public in a one-off inter-disciplinary event. Scientist-poet pairs presented their own poems and the scientific research the poems were based on. Unfortunately, we could not carry on in-person seminars and talks, so we launched our #LucyinLockdown talks series, featuring several members of the Lucy Community (including me).

We launched a termly series of academic skills sessions for undergraduates and postgraduates, designed to provide skills and techniques to perform really well academically. The well received programme was in person in the first half of the year went on-line during lockdown and the summer. Recording the sessions means that students can access events anytime and from anywhere - particularly useful where students are in different time zones.

Optimise your Future is a message that College started promoting and a continued interaction with both the central careers service and our own initiatives and will be again in place next academic year. We piloted Catalyst events, managing, despite the disruptions, to run two face-to-face sessions in Michaelmas and Lent Terms. These were events with panels of Alumnae and Fellows who spoke about alternative and different ways of using the participants’ skills set and degree. Make your Impact is our programme aimed at encouraging enterprise and an enterprising approach to studies amongst the student body. Planning was carried out over the course of 2019-20 and student engagement will start as part of new undergraduate on-boarding in September 2020.

A major goal since College first started on the path of expansion and widening participation, has been to develop the teaching staff both in terms of their own training and development. The teaching staff have also expanded as the number of students has risen. The pandemic brought with it major, rapid changes so we have all had to learn new ways of teaching. Thanks must go to IT for enabling us to teach in a virtual environment and thanks must also go to the Assistant Senior Tutor who used her experience to deliver additional and valuable teaching of the same.

Despite the circumstances, all our students sitting exams, completing assessments, or uploading dissertations, were able to do so. Remarkable. A big thank you goes to the Tutorial team who, with all additional stress that the pandemic brought on top of exams, carried on and did a brilliant job. I would also like to thank the Library, Admissions and Tutorial who kept going and made sure that we supported, graduated and admitted our students.

Welfare in College continues to play a major role in supporting students. In 2019-20, all the existing provision continued, including the free yoga, core strength training and all the events organised by the Library and Tutorial Teams. Due to lockdown the latter was virtual and well received. Counselling continued in College with in-house provision two days a week, supporting the main University services. During lockdown (and on-going) this became virtual and was able to reach students wherever they were around the world. Our College Nurse also continued her visits to College during all terms.

To conclude, the academic year 2019-20 turned out to be one of extraordinary circumstances. The pandemic has not finished and will continue to affect all our lives for some time to come. I would like to thank all College staff for their hard work in supporting our students this year.