Our strategic thinking day at the beginning of February 2012 was attended by around 30 participants from right across our range of stakeholders. It was an interesting and extremely valuable start to our strategic planning process. The day facilitated a wide discussion around the challenges and opportunities the future will hold before encouraging us to think creatively about what successful student engagement might look like in 5 years time and how sparqs will have helped the sector get there.
We are still going through the various outputs from the day but some impressions of the types of things raised include:
- Aiming more work at students rather than representatives.
- Expanding support for representatives to carry out their role, including web based resources.
- Ensuring students can use the systems we support to facilitate change.
- Creating opportunities to support student engagement nationally at a subject level and/or in professional areas.
- Exploring links with employers.
- Exploring the opportunities Curriculum for Excellence may offer.
- Supporting student engagement through regionalisation.
- Further embedding support for student engagement within institutions.
- Further supporting a culture of engagement across Scotland and influencing national developments.
We are extremely grateful for the time and inputs from our many stakeholders and these will be instrumental in shaping our ideas. Thanks also to Pauline Holland from Sensemaking Consulting who facilitated the day for us. There were many more thoughts and ideas emerging which we will spend some time capturing before we begin to draft a new strategy. We will be consulting widely as these ideas come together before launching our new strategic plan for the next five years in Autumn 2013.
