Learner journeys can refer to transitions from school, into post-16 education or training and then into work. To make those transitions more successful, it is crucial to enable students to see their journey, i.e. what they have achieved so far and what learning opportunities are available to them. This will in turn help them to make better decisions to get them to where they want to be in the future.
Following from the QAA’s Enhancement Theme, Student Transitions (2014-17), sparqs carried out a number of projects on this theme relating to various parts of the student experience of transitions, including support to cross-sector inter-disciplinary and widening access networks as well as joint work with the Higher Education Academy (as was) to run a series of events on Learner Transitions. We brought together over 70 students and around 40 staff from schools, colleges and universites at four subject-specific events across Scotland. The events enabled us to build up a picture of what students are looking forward to, and what they are scared of when going through a learning transition, and how they make choices about where to study. These events were a useful reminder to keep the focus on the curriculum when we are thinking about student transitions. This work was a precursor to some of our later work in schools.
Our Pupil voice webpage outlines our work to develop the pupil voice in schools and colleges, although this work was stopped as a result of the pandemic.
Our Articulation webpage details our previous joint work with ELRAH (the now-disbanded articulation hub) supporting articulating students taking a pathway that allows them to progress from an HNC or HND directly into the 2nd or 3rd year of a degree programme i.e. without having to start at year 1.