Education Strategy 2025/26

• Ensure student experience is consistently outstanding
• Inspire and challenge our students
• Reducing disparities in outcomes across all sections of our student population
• Promote successful graduate progression into graduate level occupations and further study
• Position academic integrity as central to each student’s learning journey
• Enable our students to gain the Hallmarks as part of our civic agenda

We will:

• Design and assess our courses to ensure that our students attain and can demonstrate the Hallmarks of a Portsmouth Graduate, providing a wide range of career-enhancing opportunities for all students. 
• Encourage and provide opportunities for our students to gain work experience as a part of their student experience, and to be able to reflect on what they have learned.
• Ensure that our staff, whatever their roles, are equipped and supported to advise and assist students in the development of their academic and employability skills. 
• Embed academic integrity into all our courses, supported by appropriate design, pedagogy, assessment and monitored during academic review.
• Ensure that our students are active partners in co-creating their Portsmouth experience, and that the student voice is consistently heard and responded to, with students' views and opinions on their experience sought, and the feedback loop consistently closed.
• Empower our students as active participants in a community of learning where staff, students, practising professionals and employers work together to learn, create, research and solve problems.
• Encourage our students to develop their global mindset through activities such as studying or working abroad, acquiring or enhancing languages, working or volunteering in relevant communities and engaging in the internationalisation at home agenda.
• Provide opportunities for our students to engage in peer and inter-cohort training, buddying and mentoring programmes.
• Take measures to address the awarding gap by deploying expert analytics systems and maximising opportunities for staff to enhance modules and courses co-created with students, including established processes like enABLe and Charrettes.
• Develop systems to monitor student engagement including in all extra- and co-curricular opportunities that contribute to their personal and professional development.
• Support and guide our students in the effective use of digital tools.
• Monitor and evaluate the impact of each activity we offer, to ensure it is adding value in helping our students achieve success in their studies.
• Actively support our students, in the initial period after graduating, to help them progress into highly skilled outcomes in employment, study, self-employment or to start their own businesses.

• Proactively responding to changing demand
• Championing Access and Inclusivity
• Revolutionising Digital Learning
• Meeting future employer and skills needs

We will:

• Make a positive, clear and significant contribution to encouraging, extending and sustaining the engagement of our students, and to inspiring and enabling their access to, success in, and progression from higher education.
• Diversify our student community by developing, promoting and delivering a broader and more flexible range of routes for entry to the University, in response to student demand, both for individuals and via strategic partnerships with educational institutions and employers, and, where appropriate, professional and statutory bodies, regionally, nationally and internationally.
• Nurture existing and create new productive collaborative partnerships with FE colleges and schools to provide pathways for progression to the University and raise expectations.
• Coordinate active engagement with employers in the region and develop a variety of flexible learning programmes that address their skills needs.
• Review our courses over a rolling three-year cycle to ensure they remain dynamic, innovative, grounded on synergies between teaching, research and professional practice, and contemporary for the changing needs of local, regional, national and global economies and communities.
• Ensure assessment is designed to promote academic integrity, underpinned by appropriate use of authentic assessment and digital technologies that promote effectiveness and efficiency.
• Ensure a range of central and Faculty-based student services support our diverse student population with their wellbeing and academic development through both common university-wide and bespoke and tailored approaches to meet particular student needs.
• Ensure our course portfolio includes both extensive blended and connected and digital and distributed learning provision, underpinned by responsive, agile and user-friendly central systems.
• Design inclusive and accessible courses which demonstrate a purposeful approach to internationalisation, fostering informed citizenship and promoting diversity and respect.
• Engage with our students to ensure that their voice is heard and fed into discussions and decisions that impact on their education and the wider student experience.

• Staff development and career progression
• Reward and recognition for evidence-based, impactful innovative practice
• Shared ownership of key agendas, such as student employability and tackling the awarding gap
• Co-design and pedagogic innovation
• Pedagogic research output
• Our physical and virtual estates enable sustainable pedagogic transformation

We will:

• Provide staff development and career progression opportunities to promote and reward innovative and effective teaching and support for student learning.
• Nurture an environment conducive to creativity, pedagogic exploration and risk appetite for academics to co-design and innovate in learning, teaching and assessment in partnership with students, colleagues and other key stakeholders.
• Provide approaches, such as enABLe and Charrettes, to support shared ownership and action to deliver on key agendas.
• Promote the wider and more creative use of Virtual Learning Environments, simulation facilities and other learning and assessment technologies to provide efficient and effective support and an integrated, streamlined, digital-by-design learning experience to students whether on or off campus.
• Engage staff in relevant continuing professional development to promote review and reflection, and, for example, to develop, disseminate, incorporate and spread best pedagogic practice to support the student experience.
• Draw on relevant research and professional practice to inspire students through subject content and pedagogic approaches that facilitate engaged and interactive learning.
• Support and guide staff in the development, effective and efficient use of digital tools for learning design, teaching practice and authentic assessment at module and course levels.
• Support staff to embed the student voice in co-creation across their academic practice.
• Recognise and reward excellence in support for the student experience.
• Engage and support staff in obtaining professional recognition of practice, notably through Advance HE’s Fellowship framework or the achievement of other relevant qualifications or types of recognition underpinning high quality teaching, support for student learning, scholarship and research.
• Develop the research culture, outputs and impacts required for an Education UoA REF submission.
• Ensure that developments in our physical estate support our innovative and effective teaching and student learning.
• Ensure that our virtual provision and “virtual estate”, including our VLE, digital tools, resources, and associated training and development, maximise benefits and efficiency for staff and students.