What getting support asks of students

Dr Stuart Grey explores how institution-wide analysis of existing survey comments can show the work students do to get support. This week's research on disabled graduates and participatory PhDs leads into practical questions about service data, engagement measures and how universities review a change.

In this episode

Keeping appreciation for helpful staff and difficulty accessing support visible together.
Comparing themes across schools, student groups and survey cycles where the evidence supports comparison.
Reading the comments behind a pattern to understand what students mean.
Connecting doctoral-support concerns with the teams able to respond.
Using student feedback evidence in decisions and checking what happens after a change.

Chapters

00:00 What getting support asks of students
01:07 Disabled graduates and the route into support
02:15 Reading survey comments across the institution
03:55 Participatory PhDs and doctoral support
05:19 Interpreting student engagement
06:31 OfS registration and feedback evidence
07:17 Reviewing an institutional change
08:02 Sources and newsletter

Research and sector sources

Disabled graduates describe the work of securing support. Patricia Sanz-Martínez and Beatriz Morgado Camacho, From classroom to career: Self-efficacy and employment success of graduates with disabilities, published online 13 January 2026. Interviews with fifteen employed disabled graduates in Spain.
Participatory PhD accounts reveal gaps in doctoral support. Cathy Beresford and colleagues, Supporting participatory PhDs: a call to action, published 22 September 2026. Reflections from eight Participatory PhD Network members.
Jisc's RAISE reflections question student engagement measures. James Hodgkin's Jisc conference reflection, 25 September 2026, and Jisc's code of practice for learning analytics.
OfS registration guidance makes student feedback evidence more explicit. Regulatory advice 3 and linked Annex G, updated 16 September 2026, for registration applications in England.

The support journey is an imagined example. The proposed institutional review and measures are Stuart's practical suggestions, not interventions evaluated by the cited research. The transcript is lightly edited for readability and correct name spelling.

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Transcript

Hi, and welcome back to Student Voice Weekly. I'm Dr. Stuart Grey, founder of Student Voice AI, and today I'd like to talk about how institutional research can help us understand the work students do to get support.

So I still teach part-time at the University of Glasgow, and I'm interested in questions that colleagues can take into a real discussion about their course or service if they're professional services staff.

This week we've got research on disabled graduates and participatory PhDs, alongside news about engagement measures and student feedback evidence.

The question connecting them all is fairly simple. When a student says the support was good, what happened before they actually received it?

That's where I think institutional research can make a useful contribution. We can look across institution at patterns in what students are actually writing in survey comments, bring those together with what our processes record, and help colleagues decide where a change is needed.

Then we can go back and see what happened after that change has been implemented.

The first paper this week is by Patricia Sanz-Martínez and Beatriz Morgado Camacho. They interviewed 15 employed disabled graduates in Spain about their experiences of university and working life.

Participants describe having to initiate requests for support and adjustments themselves, and this definitely maps to my experience of working with students with disabilities. They've got to do it themselves frequently.

For me, the useful question is about the journey into getting that support that they eventually got. So imagine a student who eventually gets an adjustment that makes a real difference to them. They're pleased with the person who helped, but before that, they've emailed different teams, repeated the explanation, and spent time checking whether anything is happening at all.

If we categorise their whole comment as positive support feedback, we could lose quite a lot. I'd want to keep the appreciation for the help alongside the difficulty of getting to it. Those point to different decisions.

So what could an institutional research team do with that?

So I'd begin by looking across the survey comments we already hold. What do students write about what happened after making a support request?

Analyse those accounts using consistent categories. How do experiences of finding the right contact, waiting for a response, or repeating information vary across schools and student groups?

Then we want to talk to the team delivering the service. What do they record already? Is there a response time measure? And make sure everyone understands when the clock starts and stops.

An automatic acknowledgment and a useful answer are different discrete events. A request marked closed might still leave the student unsure what to do.

You could review those patterns alongside service timings from the same period at an aggregate level, and make sure the survey questions, groups, and stages of the process are comparable before interpreting differences between schools or organisational units.

That helps us decide which concerns need an institution-wide response and where a more focused investigation might be more useful.

I'd also check whose experience those surveys capture. Feedback collected at the end of a successful interaction will leave out people who gave up before reaching that point, obviously.

So read relevant comments in wider student surveys as well, while being clear about whose experiences are still missing. Reading the comments behind the patterns also helps us check our interpretation. We might think the main issue is speed, while students may be writing about uncertainty over who owns their request.

That points to a different change to take back to the service.

So our second paper this week moves into doctoral education. Cathy Beresford and colleagues draw on eight member reflections from their Participatory PhD Network.

These are researchers involving public contributors in their work.

The accounts describe difficulties around paying contributors and fitting collaborative work into doctoral arrangements.

For example, when doctoral researchers write about a lack of support in their survey comments, what kind of support do they mean? Advice on their research method, permission to do something, finding a budget, getting a payment through the finance system?

Each of these involves different people, and a broad theme in a survey report can be a useful starting point, but somebody then needs to work out which decision would actually help. Looking across doctoral programmes can help us decide which questions belong with the school and which need an overall institutional response.

So I would bring a concrete process question to the graduate school and the colleagues who deal with it. Where does responsibility sit? What information does a researcher need before involving contributors? Who can resolve a request when the usual route doesn't fit, et cetera?

That gives institutional research a practical role in connecting experiences across different parts of the university. It also means keeping the research context visible.

There's also a related question in this week's sector news. Writing after the RAISE conference, Jisc's James Hodgkin asks what we're really measuring when we measure student engagement. His discussion brings in the circumstances behind attendance and the importance of talking with students.

So it doesn't tell us if a particular analytics system improves engagement, but I think it's a useful prompt for teams reviewing the measures they already use.

So if we try and do a deeper dive into what the causes are behind comments, we infrequently are sent back to what students are writing about.

Travel, timetable clashes, sessions, feelings about being able to participate, and reading those accounts wherever they may come from, help us better understand the student experience. So all of our work on engagement should come back to reading the comments.

An institution-wide comment analysis can also help us where themes recur across schools, levels of study, and over time, and make sure we know who answered which question and so we can make meaningful comparisons between these groups. Because a proportion of comments mentioning a problem might not be the proportion of all students experiencing it.

In other news this week there's new OfS registration guidance for applications made recently since September. The guidance gives more explicit examples of student engagement evidence including survey results and module evaluation feedback.

This concerns registration in England, and the quality plan table is a guide rather than a checklist, but it's really good to see this sort of evidence making its way into these sort of documents.

For colleagues preparing that material, I'd want to be able to follow a finding through from discussion to a decision. What did students raise? Who considered it? What was agreed? What are the verbatim comments backing this up? And what would we look at when reviewing this response?

So let's return to our imagined support process at the start. Suppose that a pattern appears across several services, and students and staff agree that requests need a clearer owner. The institution agrees a consistent approach, so students know who is responsible and when to expect the next update.

Before introducing that change, agree how you'll judge the outcome of it. You might look at repeat enquiries, the time to a useful response, and whether students understand the next step. Keep the definitions consistent and make sure that the follow-up is manageable for students and staff.

Once you're at the review stage, we check what else has changed. It might have coincided with something else, a quieter part of term or different mix of requests or all sorts of different factors. So it's quite hard to isolate a given change, but we can think about the things that might be affecting it.

So that's it for this week. You'll find the articles and sources in the show notes.

You can sign up for the Student Voice Weekly at studentvoice.ai. And if you work with someone in institutional research, planning, quality, or student support, please share this episode with them. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next week. Bye.