A personal experience of PDP and progress files

Case study on the introduction of personal development planning and progress files at the University of Glamorgan, taken from the Reflections on personal development planning in law paper delivered at the 2005 Socio-Legal Studies Association annual conference by Tracey Varnava and Helen James of UKCLE.

The University of Glamorgan began to develop progress files in November 2001 with the secondment of Rob East, a principal lecturer in the law school, to the learning and teaching office.

An initial audit was carried out with a view to establishing existing practice within the university prior to attempting to introduce a ‘university-wide’ scheme, and with a view to identifying examples of good practice that could be built upon. Many departments were found to already operate systems aimed at encouraging engagement in PDP amongst students; some as a result of the demands of specific professional bodies such as the Royal College of Nursing and others as a result of departmental or small group initiatives.

The next stage involved engaging a number of enthusiastic individuals from across the university to oversee the administration of progress files throughout university departments and setting up a steering group involving these individuals, together with representatives from the careers service and the education and welfare officer of the students union. Following an 18 month long research exercise, involving literature review, visits to other universities and attendance at a number of relevant conferences, a university policy was agreed and a paper-based scheme adopted in spring 2003, with a view to rolling out a fully implemented system by the year 2005-06 in compliance with the government’s progress file initiative. A number of pilot projects were also set up during the research period, directed at level 1 students, one of which ran in the law school.

Implementation

There were specific problems associated with introducing PDP into the University of Glamorgan at that particular time. The scheme was introduced as a paper-based standalone exercise incorporated within the personal tutor system, rather than being embedded within the teaching curriculum through a skills module, in line perhaps with the research undertaken by Harrison (2001) and piloted at the University of Gloucestershire (Ryan & Williams 2002).

One of the main reasons for this was that opportunities to embed the programme within the curriculum were limited. The university had recently undergone a major re-validation programme, moving, as a university, from semesterised to year long programmes of study. In addition, although an IT-based system was considered as being something that students might find attractive and interesting to participate in, the newly installed computer administration system was unable to cope with the demands that this would impose.

Operation

The system adopted was allied to the personal tutor system and involved tutors meeting with individual students for a period of 20-30 minutes each term. Two pilot studies were run, one on the Foundation Studies Programme involving over 300 students and the other on the first year of the LLB, in order to gauge student and tutor support. At this stage there was a lack of tutor support, not perhaps a good omen, and it fell to the university progress files tutor to pilot the programme with students during specifically allocated workshop sessions using role play. Feedback questionnaires, returned by over 120 students, indicated overwhelmingly that they felt the use of progress files in PDP was of value. Howeve,r the lack of tutor support is clearly problematic.

Reflection

The experience of the law school at Glamorgan in introducing progress files has been largely negative. Following the initial pilot studies the scheme was introduced across all foundation and level 1 subject areas. There has been a general lack of engagement by both tutors and students in the project. Anecdotal evidence indicates that this arises for two reasons; lack of time and lack of belief in the core values of PDP on the part of tutors, and a lack of understanding on the part of students.

Time is undoubtedly a major factor. The University of Glamorgan, in common, no doubt, with others, has attempted to introduce progress files with virtually nil resourcing. For the tutor this means an extra workload with no extra reward, either in terms of salary or in respect of time compensation. Most tutors will have an allocation of around 20 personal tutees. If expected to meet with each one for half an hour three times a year this equates to 30 hours per year, in addition to the extra administration this requires.

In a research-driven culture this, as East (2005) highlights, may well be perceived as having the potential to impact in an adverse way on promotion prospects, and is unlikely therefore to engage universal support from tutors. In addition, and perhaps another reflection of the lack of resourcing, was the accompanying absence of any meaningful staff development programme. Not only does this fail to equip tutors with the necessary knowledge to implement PDP and progress files effectively, but also establishes a culture of indifference on the part of the institution as a whole.

Many tutors at Glamorgan were also sceptical as to the value of PDP in respect of student learning and the skills agenda in general. At the point of introduction of the Quality Assurance Agency guidelines there appears to have been very little research into the efficacy of PDP in improving student learning. Indeed, the review undertaken by Gough et al in 2003 appears to have been one of the first UK-based studies to look at the issue (Clegg 2004). Although this study, which looked at 25 earlier mainly US studies, concluded that PDP seemed to have generally beneficial effects, it also stated that there was no consistency between the studies and that it was therefore impossible to know “how or why” PDP produced the positive effects reported.

Given the positive feedback from students during the pilot studies it is hard to identify the source of student apathy in respect of PDP and progress files at Glamorgan. Responses of students to individual tutors were mixed. Generally, although not exclusively, those tutors who were themselves more enthusiastic had a better student response rate. In addition, there was little attempt to introduce any element of the reflective process into assessment criteria, so that it came to be seen by students as something to be viewed in isolation that had little relevance to their everyday studies. Tutor attitude to PDP and progress files would seem from this to be core to the issue of success or failure and, in the case of Glamorgan, was possibly influenced by the lack of resources, training and support.

References

• Clegg S (2004) ‘Critical readings: progress files and the production of the autonomous learner’ Teaching in Higher Education 9(3) 287-298
• East R (2005) ‘A progress report on progress files: the experience of one higher education institution’ Active Learning in Higher Education 2(5)
• Harrison (2001)
• Ryan & Williams (2002)

Last Modified: 4 June 2010