The philosophy of integrated service design in a Widening Participation setting

A blog written from the perspective of my experience of service design and delivery as Centre Manager at the Lifelong Learning Centre (LLC), University of Leeds.

The LLC focuses on creating transformational education opportunities for students who come from backgrounds under-represented in Higher Education.

We have three main areas of activity: external and internal partnerships and adult outreach, student support and experience, and multi-disciplinary provision at undergraduate level — including degree courses, apprenticeships and foundation year programmes.

Operational cohesiveness across these strands of activity plays an important role in responding to a long-term view of the student journey, from pre-entry to on-course support, graduation and beyond.

Our service design philosophy

We like to call ourselves an ‘integrated’ service. While writing this piece, I started reflecting on what this means. We know through listening to our students and our collective staff experience that our support for students plays a key part in widening access to the University, and fostering a sense of belonging for students who are under-represented in Higher Education.

Our support service has evolved both organically and through conscious design in response to student needs. The key features of its development can be systematised, and I believe be of benefit to other HE institutions.

In our own conversations, by ‘integrated’ we mean giving students a good answer at the first point of contact, taking time to listen to them, and setting out next steps. We also try to make the service appear seamless to students regardless of the workload strain we may be feeling in the back office, which has rather been a feature of the HE landscape in the last few years.

Staff are trained to maintain a non-judgemental attitude and every student is treated as an individual. Shared spaces enable serendipity and ad-hoc support when staff bump into students and respond to their queries. Projects and activities are opened to all staff teams to nurture a cross-team working ethos, facilitate collaboration and create a shared sense of purpose.

This conceptualisation of ‘integrated’ is anything but simple. It’s an outcome of taking a social justice approach and using people-centred design principles to create services. Let me explain both.

Socially just

In the context of education, social justice is about recognising that privilege exists, taking action to challenge that privilege and creating opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds. There are, therefore, two aspects to the concept of social justice.

First, it’s about removing structural barriers. For example, students under-represented in HE may experience the University campus as an intimidating space. Students sometimes talk about ‘the big historical buildings’ and how ‘it feels that everyone on campus is middle-class’. Here, it’s important to create opportunities for access and nurture a sense of belonging, with its implications for physical and psychological safety.

Second, social justice is about achieving outcomes by creating opportunities. Our mission statement explicitly refers to this to acknowledge that once we have removed barriers, we then pull up our sleeves to support students to achieve their potential.

People-centred

Let’s move to the people-centred design principles based on my reflections as a practitioner, acknowledging that things can and do go wrong and that learning from mistakes is part of service design and delivery.

People-centred design is about not losing sight of people — our emotions, aspirations, expertise and lived experiences. As educators and administrators our policies and decisions have an impact on students’ well-being and their choice whether to continue in education. Sometimes, institutions make an error thinking that a thorough and highly standardised process — with every eventuality mapped out — will be the perfect solution to improving the quality of student experience. In reality, people rarely follow the arrows in a process flow diagram. If the balance isn’t right and there is overemphasis on process-oriented thinking, this risks the remit of ‘transactional business’ expanding too much or creating rigidity and bottlenecks in the process.

The balance between procedural compliance and staff discretion is also important in empowering staff to make sound decisions in difficult situations that demand an empathetic response. If staff are seeing student ID numbers but not connecting often with the student as an individual, it will affect the quality of decisions and responsiveness.

Indeed, working in partnership with students to co-create solutions is one of the most powerful approaches to designing tailored and responsive support services.

People-centred design, therefore, requires an approach predicated on authentic relationships where staff take the time to listen to the student and understand their needs, balancing this with efficient compliance with policies and procedures.

I think my colleagues will forgive me if I take the liberty of saying that when we talk about offering an ‘integrated’ service in the LLC, we mean people-centred design and delivery of teaching and support, underpinned by a social justice model of change in the context of widening participation.

This article was originally written for the website HE Professional and appeared on their blog in a slightly edited form on 18th May 2023.