The challenge
Establishing cross-departmental collaboration
Working with other student support departments and faculties can be challenging. Most of them have very different structures, core services and different methods of engaging, intervening and interacting with students. Promotion of additional services provided by the University can be difficult and collaboration is limited. In addition, academic staff find challenges in incorporating extracurricular paths into the established curriculum.
The objectives
- Engage more broadly with faculties and other departments.
- Raise awareness of financial skills amongst students.
Seeing our students developing the skills they need to thrive in the real world is very rewarding.
The solutions
Incorporate Blackbullion into Open Days
Sheffield Hallam is leveraging the natural collaboration of the student services, recruitment, and admissions departments around Open Days. They are moving towards using Blackbullion to help prospective students and parents understand the university funding structure and the skills they will need to thrive at university.
Blackbullion has given Sheffield Hallam a distinct starting point at Open Days. Prospective students and parents are introduced to Blackbullion and provided with a promo code to access specific modules designed to answer questions around funding, living costs, debt, bursaries and the availability of additional support.
This has resulted in Sheffield Hallam being more proactive in their mission to attract new talent, especially from widening participation backgrounds. In addition, data is being shared across departments to help reach our targets.
Introduce integrated workshops
Following on from the successful Open Days collaboration, the team at Sheffield Hallam are in the process of working directly with different faculties to improve their students’ financial capability. Sheffield Hallam’s student support services are integrating Blackbullion into specific faculty workshops to engage students with developing skills outside of their course and encouraging students to self-develop via Blackbullion.
The quality of the content, the business support provided, and the passion of the team made the investment beyond worth it for our institution.
The impact
Early success has been seen within multiple courses, including Fashion Design, Social Work and BioChemistry and the university is looking to replicate this success across all faculties.
I encourage institutions thinking of investing in Blackbullion to think more broadly about why this platform is necessary and what you can do to tackle the financial literacy deficit in the student population.
