“If you could change one thing about college, what would it be?” the teacher asks.

At first, the learners look bemused. Nobody has bothered to ask them this before. Many of them have not even considered the question, assuming that nobody would be interested or would listen to their opinions on the matter.

Eventually, one student raises her hand. “I want to start lessons at 10am,” she says.

Her contribution gets the ball rolling. Soon, the whole class is pitching in, sharing ideas about what would improve their college experience and make them more likely to attend every day and better able to focus on their learning.

This was a scene at Portsmouth College back in 2012. We were on a mission to transform the college. We wanted to improve every aspect of our work, having an impact on recruitment, achievement, the quality of education and the student experience - and we wanted our learners to tell us how to do it.

When we asked them “What do you want from your college?” some of their answers took us by surprise. Their list of priorities included things that we would never have thought of.

It sounds like a simple process, and in many ways it was. We decided to follow an AAIE (ask, analyse, implement, evaluate) approach to transforming the college.

How did this approach work in practice? In 2012, Steve Frampton, then principal, interviewed more than 500 prospective, current and former students aged 14-19 and asked them: “What do you want? Design your own FE experience and evidence your asks.”

We collated the students’ responses and analysed them, pulling out the key findings. There were some clear trends in the data. In fact, responses were consistent in 96 per cent of cases, and focused on three key areas.

So, what did the students want?

• Employability: Students wanted to be well prepared to make their way in the world. Digital skills were seen as important, regardless of the courses they were following.
• Wellbeing: Students wanted learning to be more engaging, with more fun and less stress. They wanted to be treated with respect and for the working patterns of the college to support them in managing their lives as a whole. They appealed for a compact day, a later start time and the removal of trapped time in the timetable, citing the research of leading world experts on sleep patterns and wellbeing to support their views.
• Environment: Students wanted to see the improvement of both the environment of the college and the city. They were keen for the college to take steps to reduce climate change.

As well as asking students what changes they would like to see, we also invited other stakeholders across Portsmouth to tell us what was important to them. We asked headteachers, our MP, councillors and business leaders what they really wanted and needed from FE. They highlighted the attributes that would support the employability of our young people: they would be positive, hard-working, optimistic, flexible and punctual; collaborative workers, with good data analysis and communication skills; problem solvers; and critical thinkers with strong digital skills.

Armed with this feedback, we set about making changes. We had three developments.

Firstly, we decided to change our timetable. We had been teaching a five-period day, beginning at 8.30am. We switched to a two-period day, starting at 10am. This was based on the best internationally available research about the sleep needs of young people and the times of day when they learn best.

As well as supporting students’ wellbeing and making it easier for them to meet the requirements of their study programmes, we also hoped that the new timetable would help us to make strides with another area that students had raised in their feedback: making the college greener.

The later start to the day would reduce the number of cars on the roads during peak times, reducing emissions, while the streamlined timetable meant that students didn’t have to make repeated journeys and didn’t need to attend college every day.

Once this new timetable was established, we turned to look at how we could make the learning experience more engaging, and to help students fit schoolwork more readily into their busy lives.

Our answer was, in 2014, to make an iPad available for every student and teacher.

We fully funded this out of our reserves initially - and recycled the iPads from cohort to cohort. We then moved to an optional contribution model where students could pay in instalments and keep the iPad if they chose to. In the past couple of years, the funding has come from student contributions. Those students who are unable to contribute due to financial circumstances but receive a bursary are given a device for their time at college.

Having access to a personal tablet allows students to learn independently away from the classroom; it means they can access materials and teaching to fit in with their responsibilities and commitments.

However, we realised that in order to make the best of this new technology, both staff and students would need training.

For teachers, we began running regular training sessions with Apple professional learning specialists, and workshops hosted by a member of staff who is an Apple distinguished educator. For students, we recruited a large group of Apple ambassadors and trained them to assist their peers with the use of the technology.

It also quickly became apparent that our existing IT infrastructure was not up to scratch to support all students and staff using mobile devices. We needed to significantly ramp up our wireless coverage and overhaul our firewall and filtering systems.

Only once we had tackled these issues could we turn to focus on the third thing that students had asked us for: improvements in their employability.

In 2015, we introduced a programme called E6, working with Unloc, a student-led social enterprise. This was aimed at embedding provision into programmes of study that would enhance work readiness and present pathways to employment, as well as building digital skills.

We had asked students what they wanted, and listened. But what was the impact of following their advice? What outcomes have we seen as a result of the research?

So far, the results have been very positive. Changing the college timetable increased attendance by 6 per cent, and 98.7 per cent of students surveyed over the five-year period between 2013 and 2018 cited this as the main reason for their improved attendance, wellbeing and learning.

Meanwhile, the implementation of the iPad scheme has seen an improvement in the overall student pass rate and the narrowing of the attainment gap, both between genders and between disadvantaged and advantaged students, at both Level 2 and 3. In GCSE English, the pass rate increased from 40 per cent to 70 per cent.

We have also seen a dramatic increase in uptake as a result of our training programme. In 2014, 88 per cent of staff did not use their iPad in every lesson due to limited skill and confidence. But by 2016, 72 per cent of staff identified themselves as a “confident” or a “mastery level” user. And in 2020, the department-level student voice demonstrated that iPads were used in almost all lessons, with flipped learning embedded in the teaching and learning ethos of the college.

Of course, there have been challenges along the way. Teachers’ technological skills vary - some are more confident than others using the iPads. Sometimes, when we recruit new members of staff, we find ourselves having to start the whole process from scratch.

The change in timetable also proved challenging for some - we soon realised that the long lessons were tough for those resitting GCSE maths. They struggled to engage and concentrate for that period of time. To counterbalance this, we modified the start and end times of these sessions.

Yet, the good has definitely outweighed the bad, overall.

All of this positive change began with a simple question to students: “What do you want?” If we had known that the responses would make such a difference to our college, we probably would have asked sooner.

Emily Pountney is vice-principal of curriculum, teaching and learning; Chris Wood is curriculum leader for performing arts; and Gemma Conway is curriculum leader for science and access to HE, all at Portsmouth College

This article originally appeared in the 7 August 2020 issue under the headline “What do students want from college? Go on, ask them”