full report - Higher Education Academy

Students
The HEA’s Postgraduate Taught Experience Survey (PTES)
continued to increase its engagement with students and
institutions, with 83 institutions taking part in PTES 2012 (up
from 80 in 2011) and 54,640 students responding to the survey
(up from 38,756 in 2011). The national response rate was
24.7% (up from 17.8% in 2011). This year PTES 2012 created
new benchmarking groups for million+ and University Alliance
institutions. The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey
(PRES) is run biennially and did not run in 2012. The HEA will
provide both PTES and PRES to the sector in 2013.
Student attitudes towards and skills for sustainable development, a
report by the HEA and NUS, was published this year, following
on from the 2011 first phase report on first-year students’
attitudes to education for sustainable development (ESD). The
report showed that students expect universities to address
sustainability issues and that they would be willing to take a
pay deduction if their employers had a strong environmental
performance. Students believe employers value sustainability
skills, according to the research, with almost 80% of secondyear
students viewing universities as a key provider of these
environmental, social and economic skills. In June this year, the
HEA’s Academic Lead for ESD attended the World Symposium
on Sustainable Development at Universities (WSSD-U-2012)
to talk about the HEA’s ESD institutional change programme,
Green Academy. The next phase of this study (to be researched
this coming academic year and published in 2013) will focus on
whether there has been a shift in sustainability attitudes as a
result of the increased student tuition fees.
Providing a discipline context is a national HEA priority, and
the Business and Management discipline is working on a book
of 14 case studies of practice, entitled Enhancing education for
sustainable development, with contributions from a range of
business disciplines in UK universities and worldwide.
The HEA Connections initiative, in partnership with the UK
Council for International Student Affairs (UKCISA), provided
20 grants totalling over £160,000 to pilot projects supporting
internationalisation. The Connections funding supports HEIs
to enhance the teaching and learning experiences both for
international students studying in the UK and home students in
the context of internationalisation, and to promote intercultural
understanding to prepare students for employment in a
global context.
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