Designing a PAR

Basic Process

Take what a school/department values about what it already does to provide academic support and guidance for its students
Also take what else it may be required to do to meet external demands
Bring these together in a streamlined, integrated scheme
Build a schedule of personal tutor meetings around year-specific, key events for students and their tutors and provide them with basic agendas
From these meetings spin off documentation in two directions

records which the department needs for e.g. QA and its own purposes
materials which students will value because they enhance their understanding of their progress.

There are basically two aspects to consider:

the programme of personal tutorials, including judging the timing of the key meetings so as to be most useful and productive for staff and students
the accompanying documents, including the basic agendas for the scheduled meetings, the proformas which focus students' preparation for meetings, the joint records of the meetings and materials for follow-up.

Schools/departments starting from cold on PARs are strongly recommended to think through these two aspects on paper first, to clarify their design ideas, before moving into IT with the Internet-PARs if they wish.

For example, the basic agendas for the scheduled meetings constitute a school's/department's agreed definition of what its personal tutoring should cover at specific points in the academic year for each yeargroup of students. Schools/departments need to be clear on principles such as this which they wish to operate, before beginning to set up their PAR on IT.

Scheduling of tutor-tutee meetings

See Scheduling of tutor-tutee meetings for possible programmes of personal tutorials.
See Ideal PAR programme for the latest thinking.

Basic components of a PAR

See Basic components of a PAR for an outline of the documentation needed.

Sample paper-based PAR: University of Nottingham, School of English Studies

See Download PAR documents for a sample set of PAR documents (including examples of basic agendas for scheduled meetings) which has been used in many departments as the starting point for customising PARs.