Bridging the gap: how academic success coaches and tutors are supporting student retention with Kortext stream at the University of Bedfordshire  

Overview

• Bedfordshire introduced Kortext stream in 2021 to support student nurse retention.
• Since then, stream has been deployed institution-wide to improve student retention.
• Near real-time engagement data enables early identification of at-risk students.
• Adopting stream aligned with Bedfordshire’s revised approach to student support.

The challenge

• Lower student retention, particularly for foundation and level 4 students, with early disengagement potentially leading to withdrawal.
• Existing challenges effectively addressing courses with low continuation, high resit rates or persistent engagement concerns.
• The increasing level of support required by first generation students entering a widening participation university.
• Different cultural academic norms, resulting in challenges for international students to navigate university processes and expectations.

People that didn’t come from the university struggled initially to work out how, who, what people do in the university … we have a lot of international students who don’t understand the processes and the implications, so they get hassled for not attending.

Patricia Kuevi, Academic Success Tutor

Bedfordshire’s approach

• Bedfordshire introduced two new roles to provide an additional layer of support: Academic Success Tutors and Coaches (ASTs and ASCs).
• Both are responsible for a wide range of student support activities. ASTs also teach timetabled workshops, while ASCs focus on relationship building.
• Data from stream enables staff to nuance their conversations with students and understand how they’re engaging beyond in-person attendance.
• A community of practice for ASTs, ASCs, learning development and academic librarian teams was established to promote information sharing.

In our roles as coaches … we tell the students to come to us with everything. So you find that they do come to us with personal stuff. Yes, we will signpost them, but they feel comfortable coming to us first because we tell them these things could be barriers to their success – they come to us with everything.

Emma Emmanuel, Academic Success Coach

Impact

Enhanced student support
Over the past academic year, ASTs and ACTs – aided by stream – supported 1600+ students, in addition to the support provided by Personal Academic Tutors and other university support services.

Improved success rates
Since this new support approach was deployed, assessment first-time pass rates have increased and resit rates have decreased in all target areas, with improvements seen in all faculty areas of the university.

Increased student autonomy
All support team members encourage students to access their own engagement data on stream. This information has allowed students to recognise for themselves the power of early engagement and they’ve been keen to share this realisation with their peers.

More effective processes
Since adopting stream, the university has implemented policy changes and moved away from processes managed by spreadsheet. Further, improved data sharing has enabled holistic support mechanisms and made closing the loop on actions much simpler.

We use stream every day … If we call a student, meet a student, email a student, we try and log it straight away and then we’ll go back in and add comments to our interactions as it develops. And we do referrals to the Wellbeing Team, Counselling, Learning Development – it’s really useful and it’s instantaneous. You can see that they’ve picked it up.
Elizabeth Stewart, Academic Success Tutor