University of Cumbria enhances student support delivery with Symplicity Advocate
The University of Cumbria (Cumbria) is a growing university with over 14,000 students and four campuses in Carlisle, Lancaster, Ambleside, and London. Having been a Symplicity partner since 2020, Cumbria uses Advocate for its holistic case management of student engagement by its Support Services.
In 2020, Cumbria’s leadership recognised that the university needed a new model for managing student support, wellbeing and conduct cases due to an in-house system that was no longer effective in catering for the growing number of enquiries and cases.
Having reported its lowest drop-out rate on record as of March 2022, Cumbria has made significant improvements in its student retention, and will be using Advocate to further bolster these efforts. Over the past year, with a student support service underpinned by Advocate, Cumbria has ensured that the concerns of students, professional services staff and academic departments are appropriately addressed in a timely manner.
Building Trust
Previously, Cumbria was using an in-house system that was no longer meeting the needs of both the institution and the changing demographic of Cumbria’s students. The Student Services team had multiple spreadsheets and different ways of recording data across numerous teams located across its four locations.
As a result, they were looking for a solution to help streamline their operations. Ultimately, Cumbria wanted a centralised way for students to self-report any concerns related to their university life, or for anyone in the university or wider community to refer a student to the support centre.
Now, with Symplicity Advocate, staff members are automatically assigned to an incoming submission so that the appropriate adviser can address the concern based on the case category and severity, which dynamically matches with the student record via an integration with Cumbria’s wider systems. This public-facing ‘Student Enquiry Point’ has transformed the university’s collection and routing of cases. The tools within the staff-facing Advocate system then ensures Cumbria can target actions, provide timely intervention and develop a whole university approach to supporting students.
“Students can now be more effectively directed to the support available to them, whether that is self-help information or access to a member of the student services team",
Emma Bales, Director of Student Services at the University of Cumbria
“We are also now able to track and quantify the types of support concerns students are raising, which helps us to prioritise and direct resources accordingly.”
Accountability and Efficiency
Symplicity Advocate enables Student Services Managers to generate fast and accurate reports that help drive timely decision-making. For Cumbria this is especially important given the wide range of teams that handle incoming cases, spanning from Safeguarding to Wellbeing, Disability to Chaplaincy and International Support to Accommodation.
To further integrate their processes, Cumbria leverages the appointment and scheduling capabilities within the Advocate system to allow students to book slots with advisors depending on staff availability. “Whilst we introduced Advocate initially in Student Services, we recognise the potential in the functionality that the system offers for other areas of the University and we already have projects in training to broaden the use of the system beyond our service”, said Bales.
“Advocate has enabled our teams to work more collaboratively and has enhanced consistency across our operations. Most importantly though it now means student interactions with the service are recorded centrally, and all cases related to a particular student are aggregated thus improving communication and service delivery for students”
The next project for Cumbria is to use Advocate to record and manage gender-based violence and hate crime incidents.
Measuring Risk
When students, professional services, academic staff or third parties submit their concerns into Cumbria’s Advocate system the rules-based engine assigns the case to the most relevant teams and notifies the associated system users to take the next steps. The University has developed a range of ‘flags’ associated with known retention risks. For users with the appropriate permissions access to view individual or groups of students, this offers a 360-degree view of all the factors that may be a barrier to a student’s success. As a result, Cumbria’s student support team can prioritise the students that are particularly at risk of withdrawal.
Data Speaks
Every case, enquiry and set of actions within Advocate is recorded and reportable. Cumbria’s System Administration team, led by Christian Stretton, organises and analyses the data so that the student services department can act quickly based on trends. The target is for these insights to inform future campus-wide decisions that improve the safety and wellbeing of students. Furthermore, Cumbria will use Advocate reporting to guide resource allocation for particular departments and locations.
“By having access to really good and accurate data we have been able to improve our interactions with our students, which gets better and better all the time” says Stretton. “Between August 2021 and May 2022, we processed 5,945 cases through Advocate, using a more streamlined and considered approach and now we’re able to address student concerns in real-time without things getting lost. The result is that students have easy access to getting the support they need.”
