Increasing the reach of the Skills Centre

The Library Skills Centre provides centralised academic support to students across all levels and courses within the university. In the 2021/22 academic year, the Skills Centre saw 3837 unique students. While the service is inclusive, groups of students are underrepresented in attendance figures, who have also been highlighted in the university’s Access and Participation Plan. In order to address this, a small scale research project was undertaken by the Library's Skills Centre to ascertain potential barriers to learning and make suggestions about possible meaningful interventions to overcome these. Research was undertaken by Skills Centre staff alongside student researchers and findings were used to inform the co-creation of a new induction workshop with the input of Skills Partners. This report summarises the main findings from the project, insights about working and co-creating resources with students and recommendations to inform future practice.