This is a speech that I gave at the Higher Education Academy 'how the HEAR is supporting student employability' event on the 17th December:

 

So it turns out that employers don't just want do'ers, they want all rounders. People who not only have the ability to get the job done, but also a capacity to build supportive relationships in and out of the workplace. 

 

As institutions, there are huge drivers to offer such opportunities and now to award them. Both in terms of boosting metrics that aid recruitment such as student satisfaction and DELHI but also increasingly in terms of promoting participation in activities that aid retention and success. All areas where Students' Union's should be involved with.

 

Students of course do a lot of things that employers are interested in. Taking the example of sports clubs and societies alone - here in Swansea that's participation to the tune of approximately 7,000 students. 

 

But should our principle be to award everyone who participates? We don't think so. But we should do believe that there needs to be recognition for all levels of achievement.

 

In the Students' Union we're in the process of using the NUS CBI skills report to link desirable graduate attributes to the opportunities that are on offer. In order to assess whether or not students have developed those skills, we're developing a reflective exercise with students which has to completed before they're considered for an award.

 

Institutions can't simultaneously offer a hundred opportunities and stick it on a prospectus as something that they offer - students rightly expect equality of access and we owe it to them. That means every student must have access to an opportunity that can be recognised by the institution on the HEAR. So there are two things here - how Students' Union's broaden their offering in terms of activities and also how institutions support the management of the resulting paper work.

 

The role of a Students' Union on the HEAR will probably depend on the level of development in an institution and the level of commitment from an institution on the project. Earlier someone asked how do we gauge what students feel or want from the HEAR - well one clear role for Students' Union's here is to research what students want and make recommendations on their behalf.

 

We also heard some fantastic presentations earlier about the different opportunities that Swansea provides. Students don't like being pigeon holed into a single activity. They also recognise when paper work exists for the sake of paper work or it exists because one bit of the university hasn't spoken to the other. Students also like choices and permeability between those choices. That means it's incredibly likely that they're taking part in more than one opportunity that could be awarded by the institution and really annoyed if it takes them more than an hour to complete the reflective exercise. Students' Union's have a huge role to play in helping to evaluate and review how individual awards work, but also the whole structure of how the HEAR is administered in an institution to make it work for students.

 

The role of Students' Union's is also to challenge assumptions made about students. To what extent is the process of getting an award unnecessarily obstructive. For example, if it takes you 6 hours to fill out the reflective exercise, it's probably a barrier to students taking part.

 

Who is getting the award - are there groups of students who don't do it? Do we know why? Is the institution running interventions to support those groups? Are we recognising a broad range of activities? Do we even have a broad range of activities to cover all of our students? Simon earlier gave the example of your part time student parent who is involved on the governing body of her kids school. Are the opportunities we offer to accredit suitable for that student - why can't we include that opportunity?

 

Here at Swansea University, the institution has an excellent approach in working with the SU - the objective is to work in partnership with students with the institution and the Students' Union defining the context of that partnership. It's in that sort of environment that I believe Students' Union's can be constructive in how they add to an institutions HEAR development.