Chapter 8: Personalising Student Retention and Success Through Employing Recent Graduates as Student Success Officers

Abertay University is proud of its social inclusion mission and recognises the need for improvement in its ability to retain its students in the first year of study. In 2021, Abertay introduced three Student Success Officer (SSO) posts, who were recent graduates, one per School. Their remit was to deliver personalised interventions with new students that ensured those students re-engaged with their university experience. The focus was on improving retention through peer-to-peer conversations and saw the SSOs triangulating information drawn from learning analytics data, institutional staff and students. This drew upon a model developed in England (Millard & Janjua, 2020), where the role helped to inform and enhance a devolved personal tutor system. At Abertay, this tutoring system did not exist, and the SSO role was required to engage with a centralised School Academic Advising model. This chapter shares details of the model deployed at Abertay, its operation and the outcomes that saw a better understanding of the challenges facing students and improvements in student retention. It also considers the wider implications of integrating this approach for student development and how it can enhance student success.