This article reviews the five contributions to the Forum on ‘Access and transition to higher education’ in Volume 2 of this journal, and considers the needs of all potential undergraduate students–especially those from backgrounds from which students have rarely come, including the most disadvantaged. The article reflects upon secondary school curricula and pastoral care provision, and also on the need for more specific tuition in key skills in the courses offered by universities.

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 21, Issue 2, Page 176-197, April 2022. Successful induction has been evidenced to strengthen students’ learning, engagement and feelings of belonging. Technology offers opportunities for enhancing the student induction experience, especially pre-arrival, but has been under-utilised. This article provides an evaluation of an online induction learning resource for pre-arrival students in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Warwick in 2019. There will be particular focus on the method of co-designing the resource (...) with a group of current students. The article will demonstrate how online learning resources for pre-arrival students can support successful induction. It argues that co-designing digital student experience resources in collaboration with students aids the development of materials that students find engaging and that co-design has a range of benefits for staff and students who are involved in the process. (shrink)

Attitudes of university teachers to learning support for first-year students are likely to influence whether the first year is a positive experience. In this study, teachers in the first year of a Bachelor of Arts programme were asked about their perceptions of the importance of supporting first-year students, the adequacy of current practices, and the problems facing first-year students in the Faculty. Responses indicated a general recognition of the need for first-year students to develop as independent learners and the need (...) for adequate orientation and good communication with students. However, there were indications that some teachers assume that first-year teaching does not require any special strategies or techniques and that more needs to be done to ensure that students are supported to develop as independent and autonomous learners. (shrink)

This article continues the debate about the transition from school to university begun in the international forum in volume 2 of this journal and developed in the thoughtful response from Michael Marland in volume 2. It examines some of the many points made there in relation to students’ own views. Interested colleagues at different institutions were invited to issue a short questionnaire to first-year undergraduates studying English, to discover how well prepared they felt for specified aspects of this transition. Some (...) of the outcomes have discipline-specific implications, but others may be applied more widely. The article focuses on students’ responses to the different teaching methods used, the amount of reading required of them, and essay writing. It identifies areas where the transition is fairly smooth, but highlights others where student responses suggest that all those involved, including policy makers and politicians, need to rethink. (shrink)

This article addresses the complex issue of lecturers’ subject knowledge and teaching. It explores the subject knowledge models of Banks, Leach and Moon and of Grossman, Wilson and Shulman . The article then delineates how these can be used in the development of robust teaching models of the subject. It also suggests how these models can be used to develop a scholarly view of teaching and how this may impact on student transition and development. The article emerges from a study (...) of teaching and learning in English Literature departments within the UK higher education sector, but it draws conclusions and offers recommendations applicable to teaching across the Arts and Humanities in and beyond the UK context. (shrink)

This article reports a project designed to foster first-year music students' academic study skills and to investigate their expectations and experiences of starting at university. Data gathered through questionnaires, diaries and in-class tasks reveal the change in learning strategies and musical identity the students experience in their first semester of the music degree course. Academic work and anxieties about workload and assessment challenge the focus on performing which has previously been the students' main source of musical involvement, necessitating a redefinition (...) of what it means to be musically successful. These findings are discussed in the broader context of musicians' life-span development, and the article concludes with some implications for practice in higher education and beyond. (shrink)