Ian, Unibuddy  0:10  
Well, hi, everyone. Thanks very much for joining our webinar today on the power of peer to parents in decision making. And so I'm joined today by Yvonne, who's from Wooton Academy Trust, and also Elliott's from the University of Leicester. Now, we'll do some proper intros in a moment. So you kind of get a feel for what we do. But I think we have to be honest and say, when we first originally came up with this idea for this webinar, we didn't expect it to be doing it from three different locations and online. And obviously, the world has changed quite a lot since then. But we're really pleased that you could join us today because I think the topic itself has probably become even more important, since when we first devised this idea, this idea of digital recruitment and actually engaging with online activities. We all know that kind of he fairs and open days they've had to be cancelled. But I think we still have a real duty and a real passion to make sure that students are not missing out and they still got all this stuff. They need throughout the application cycle. So we're particularly going to be focusing on how peer to peer can be used as a research and information tool to help students and how elements of the offline experience like open days can still be accessed online. And we're also going to focus at the end and talk a little bit about the the Unibuddy UCAS feature has been live since November. I know Elliot and Yvonne are making, making good use of that. And obviously, we want to talk a little bit more about that with you as well, and how you might want to integrate that into your work. So before we move on, I'll just do a very quick introduction about myself, then I'll kind of let the two the two main stars have their go. So I'm Ian. So I'm one of the customer success managers at unibuddy. So I support universities across the globe and in helping them set up with a platform and then support them throughout their subscription to help them get maximum value. And I'm pleased to say Elliot from the University of Leicester is one of those partners that I kind of work with really closely. So I'm pleased they can join us on the webinar today. So we've got two different perspectives, two different viewpoints. Obviously we've got a university and a school. So Yvonne, do you want to give us a little bit more detail about your role and your Academy as well, to give us a little bit of flavour?

Yvonne, Wooton Academy Trust  2:06  
Yes. So I'm the head of careers at Woods an academy trust I've been qualified careers advisor for, it's coming close to 20 years now, which I can't believe. And but I am essentially responsible for all careers education information, advising guidance for about 1600 students. So we have students from 13 to 18. And so I have an upper school and college and I'm responsible for everything to do with our next steps in the future. Me and me alone.

Ian, Unibuddy  2:37  
Small, just a small role, then! Elliot, can you tell us a little bit more about your role as well?

Elliot, University of Leicester  2:44  
Yeah, so I'm fairly new and this is my kitchen. And I am the recruitment manager at the University of Leicester. And so within my team, I have our kind of UK recruitment function and how each function under me so working all the way through from kind of primary learners to mature learners and everything student in between, within the intake that falls in my remit. So again, no pressure. And I guess a lot of my team's work is revolving around providing advice and guidance to students and make help them make informed decisions about the universities, they're looking at choosing or if University is for them in the first place. Lots of sort of peer to peer falls pretty heavily under that in terms of a way of providing that reassurance to students. I've been at Leicester for over seven years now. And the last two months seems to have been about that seven years is in total, about seven years, and then previously worked at another university and six on college as well. So kind of a range of experience.

Perfect, thank you. So I've got a series of questions. I want to ask both of you and I want to get your different perspectives on those different questions. Now, first of all, I'm quite keen to know obviously, we can't avoid the fact that COVID happens. So how, what were you doing before and how have you had to adapt what you were doing before? Seeing that nothing can really happen physically anymore, so how have you kind of gone from process of moving everything to online and how was that? How did you go about doing that? So first of all to you, Yvonne, how have you found that process? And what have you moved online that used to do physically,

Yvonne, Wooton Academy Trust  4:09  
it's actually been really challenging because from a school and college point of view, as well, we have a lot of safeguarding considerations of our young people. And so that has affected our ability to provide one to one guidance and support to our students. And so when it's normal times in school, in college, and as students receive a lot of one to one support and guidance to help them unpick all of their, you know, all the research that they're doing and figure out exactly where they see themselves and think about pros and cons of different things. And at the moment, that's pretty much on hold. We don't have the opportunity to do that with them. And they're also missing I think the main challenges being the loss of all of our big kind of face to face event for students where they meet employers, or alumni or you know, those role models, the people that they ask you different questions that they would ask their careers advisor or an admissions tutor at a university. If they're not going to say to an admissions tutor, I'm really worried I'm not going to be good enough on your course. You know, how difficult is it, but they would ask that of a student, they would ask that of a past student who comes back to see them, you know, what's it really like? And so we're missing those events where we have lots of our alumni and undergraduate students and employers coming in to speak to our students face to face. And so the challenge has been finding online opportunities for them to still have that and luckily, that there has been a lot of that coming up. And I think I've said before that some universities and some employers are doing better than others, and usually the ones who are already well ahead on the digital side of things, and places that aren't used to doing a lot of digital stuff haven't quite got there yet. They're only just starting to think actually, we really need to be doing this, because this seems to be going on a lot longer than we expected. And so there have been enough things for us to send our students to. And we also already used some digital platforms already like unibuddy with our students. So the transition hasn't been too awful in that respect. And but I do still mourn the loss of all of that face to face support that they were having.

Ian, Unibuddy  6:25  
How did you how to even start the process of one so obviously, you didn't have a lot of time to prepare for this. No one did. How did you adapt? How did you know what you could move online? Where did you was there support into what was the process? 

Yvonne, Wooton Academy Trust  6:37  
So I am I am part of a local careers, network careers. People are great at sharing information, actually, they're really supportive of each other. So I am part of a local careers network, both a school's network and the college's network because I work in both in school and in college. And that's been really good for sharing information about you know, great online stuff that we've found. And just my colleagues in school in college are brilliant at sharing that information as well. You know, some teachers have been getting information directly from universities, about opportunities online to engage with them. And they've been forwarding that on to me. And you know, so everyone's really good at sharing information. But the first thing I had to do was actually sit down and look at what I've been cancelled from not being in school anymore. And me personally, I've had to cancel over 70 different events. I mean, we do a lot, and in our school and college, and we just got to the point of received a quality award and everything was taking along beautifully. So I made a huge list of everything that was missing. And then I looked to see what could be replicated by online provision and, you know, things that were being put in place by others. I'd say about half of it, we could probably find something that would fit with still having the intended learning outcomes and the intended support. The rest of it unfortunately just can't really be replicated in another way. So we're having to think about how to catch that up with students when we are back in school, hopefully,

Ian, Unibuddy  8:10  
I think big respect to teachers and career advisors, because it's such a difficult thing when you've had no time to plan at all. And actually, they're really complex ecosystems as well. I said all the safeguarding issues so far, so yeah, big respect to all the teachers and careers advisors out there for that. And from a university perspective, Elliot, I know a big part of the recruitment cycle is your open days is at fairs. All of that is gone. So how have you managed to adapt so quickly? Because I think you've probably seen in the university market at the moment has been one of the great kind of initiatives in terms of moving so quickly and changing your strategy so quickly, and so online. So how, how have you done it? What's your top tips?

Elliot, University of Leicester  8:46  
And I think one of the main topics we were very quick to listen to people, and rather than just kind of go gung ho and think, right, we think we know what people want, let's just do everything we think. We know people want, actually listening to the market, whether it's students, whether it's advisors and teachers or parents are just kind of hearing from other universities about what's going what was going well or what what people are talking about, then we're able to adapt quite quickly to thinking about what kind of activities or kind of initiatives or, and products or placements or whatever we put on. So that was as a as a team, I was quite keen for us to continue that all throughout the March when it was looking a bit iffy at the start of March. And we were getting word that things like UCAS exhibitions might be cancelled and obviously thinking towards, even in the current cycle with our off the older days, and that we obviously would normally deliver on campus as the one example from a user that is universally been really, really good at working together on and kind of getting stuff done pretty quickly and accessing stuff pretty quickly. So we had a discussion at the start of a week, where we thought that our digital approach today would pretty much just be a unibody live event. By the end of the week, we had content from 20 odd departments while on our website, all taster lectures that have been filmed that week from home, supported by live events. So it was it was amazing to see kind of everyone come together for that. And so In terms of top tips, I think it's kind of not thinking too far ahead has halped, adapting pretty quickly rather than trying to think okay, here are some open days I'm going to run, how do we replicate them? It's actually, when we have that initial thought there was eight weeks between that and the summer open day so actually getting people to even think about coming to summer open days is a challenge because that's where lead generation and things like UCAS fairs and going to schools and talking to students would obviously be a key part. Kind of generate interest in university. So yeah, it's been it's been a learning curve. It's not all been a bed of roses, but we've we've done okay.

Ian, Unibuddy  10:46  
Yeah, it was stress levels for everyone have gone up. So yeah, lots more video calls. Zoom. Zoom has been getting good use I think. So same question to you, but how have you kind of made the shift because I mean, again, from working at a university myself, they are very complex organisations, various different people involved. So how have you kind of got by it, I guess to move everything online? And have you got them all involved what you have done?

Elliot, University of Leicester  11:11  
I think the one redeeming feature, I guess, of this whole situation is that we kind of been forced to, yeah, those that maybe wouldn't have bought in if it was an optional choice, well, we could do this or we could do this. I think we would, it would take a lot longer maybe maybe wouldn't have happened. And whereas now we've been kind of forced to think okay, most stuff does need to be online quite quickly. And that has helped with buy in, particularly across our academic community. And they've been amazing in terms of embracing things like having a staff profile on anybody or being ready to deliver webinars quite quickly. And that's, that's really, really helped. And I think one of the one thing I'm also quite keen on ensuring we don't do is go kind of 100 percentage to I think those obviously, we don't want to disadvantage those that don't have either access to the tech that we need or have only very limited access. So we've done a cool campaign recently, and reaching out to our contextual offer holders to kind of see how else we can support if they've been able to access the stuff that we've done. And if not, what else could we be doing? So whilst analogy is great, and then using technology is great. I think universities need to be careful to not just ignore the fact that people don't always have access to zoom for example, or, and if we say we want to run a webinar on this particular topic on this day, this time, Pete loads people won't be able to access that. So it's kind of foolish to think otherwise.

Ian, Unibuddy  12:36  
That's a good point actually - not everyone has has access to the same kind of digital experiences. So yeah, that's a really good point that hadn't really thought of actually before.

Elliot, University of Leicester  12:44  
I guess that the, the counterpoint to that is they they've good thing is with things like the general anybody platform is that it's always on. So if people have restricted access, it's, it's okay. We can always point to that we're always here. Whereas I think if you don't have that kind of service as a university, and the listening and the reassurance service, I think it would probably be a bit of a struggle, at the moment.

Ian, Unibuddy  13:04  
Yeah, I think it's great point, man in terms of this is a question for both of you. Do you feel like this is strengthen the relationships between schools and universities? Are you talking more than ever? Because there's so much uncertainty or actually, as the relationship worsened or just stay the same. So how is that relationship? First of all, from a school perspective?

Yvonne, Wooton Academy Trust  13:21  
I think initially, as Elliott said, we did have, you know, quite a few universities asking us what do you need? I think the difficulty at that time was it was so early on in it that we didn't really know what we needed at that point. So I think when I responded to things like that, I was just like, as much as possible, like whatever you think you can do, just please do it. And we will, we will get our students involved. And so I think communication from universities in terms of them asking us what was needed was really good. And I think that actually should continue. Because I think sometimes you know, I've worked universities as well. I've worked on both sides of the aisle. And I know that sometimes, you know, you can make assumptions about what you think is needed and what you think will be popular with schools and what sort of support is needed. And actually, that can be quite different to what is actually needed out there. And so I think continuing that, again, some universities are much better at doing that than others. And but continuing that relationship, I think, would be really important. And other than that, it has felt, I mean, I probably receive at least 600 emails a day. It's not just universities, as you can imagine. I have employers I have students have teachers, and it's bombardment at the moment, you know, everybody's really keen to help and help in a million different ways. And actually, it can be quite challenging, just sorting through that communication. So I think that has been overwhelming. I think where possible if that can be put into one email, rather than 10 different emails. Leicester have actually been really good at doing that. I'm not just saying that because Elliott's here. But for example, our, our executive principal of the whole trust received that email from Leicester, where it really clearly just showed lots of different activity on offer. And he was really impressed with it. And the whole thing went in our newsletter home to all of our parents. And that has nothing to do with me. I just saw it in the newsletter afterwards, because he just appreciated how clear and concise it was and how it all came together. And because that communication can be an overload at times, and it from all angles.

Elliot, University of Leicester  15:38  
I think from from outside, we saw I've been managing the team for nearly three years and I definitely felt over the last three, three months, we've listened more than we ever have to the market. Everyone, students and teaching advisors, it's definitely been clear that we've done that, I think, because of with with higher education being such a cyclical thing, as as I've mentioned. A minute ago, you can get kind of not maybe stuck. But you can get used to knowing, in theory, what students are going to want or schools are going to want at certain times of the year we have, everyone always has timeline slides on their, on their presentations about this time you will learn about this. And this time you'll learn about this when actually, I think this is as this has made us sit up and think actually know what is what is it that can add value, but also continually listening is very, very important. And not just doing it once when everyone said no one really knew anything of this stuff. And I think the other thing we've tried to maintain the stance being quite open and honest, and and kind of saying it's actually okay that we don't know the answer. And from quite early on, because no one knew the answer to any questions stick around when exams were cancelled. And there was a confusion about how grades are going to be sorted. I had I had a bit of a hunch that schools might have thought universities knew more than they have cottoned on, but we didn't. So we were quite open and honest and say we actually don't know. And I think that helps strengthen relationship with some of the schools is it ratio that actually we, as soon as we would know, we would get in touch in that date on when and when anything changed. And so I think relationships wise, it has probably strengthened for us among some of our schools, if that's been really good. And but I do realise that not everyone has taken that same approach. So, I don't know.

I think that's quite reassuring to think, not just University schools, but everyone, the sense of community is probably more important than ever, and actually sharing and communicating with each other, probably is needed more than ever before. So that's reassuring to hear. I know lots to do that really well. And I think Yeah, as you said, there's probably patchy across the different universities and schools, but I think this is probably the most important time where we do need to be communicating with each other. And in terms of kind of moving on to more sort of peer to peer Yvonne, I'm quite keen to hear about your thoughts on how peer to peer can be used as a tool to help students with their research. And also how have you kind of more formally embedded that within your kind of career strategy at Wooton.

Yvonne, Wooton Academy Trust  17:56  
And so, as I mentioned briefly before, I am I've worked in all sorts of roles as a careers advisor. And so a lot of one to one work with students where you start to see what barriers they have and the confidence that they have to kind of ask questions and talk to different people. And I've then worked in universities, and two different universities were for around 10 years. And my role was widening participation in universities, why we'd work with young people anywhere from about, I don't know about eight years old, seven or eight were the youngest ones right up to 18 year olds, and doing events with them. And in both of those roles, we were really clear about the power of using current students at those universities to mix with those students. And that was at the centre of every single event we ever did. Because actually, what they really needed was exposure to positive role models and people who could talk about their experience of university in a much more relatable way. I could talk about university, I went myself, but it was a very long time ago. And so actually the power of speaking to somebody who was there at the time, or who has recently gone through that application process or whatever it might be, it's so much more powerful and useful to a young person than an advisor or, you know, a parents or whoever it might be giving probably the same information, but just in a drier way, and actually probably not as accurate as well. On the other side of things as well, you know, looking at university University, prospectuses or college prospectus is its marketing isn't it it's all marketing material, it's going to put everything in the best light with the you know, the positive sunshine pictures and, and but a student's perspective you're talking to appear, you will get a realistic view of what life would it be like it that particular University and or what life would be like studying a particular course or the challenges of a particular course. And so I was already well bought into the power of peer to peer learning, I've seen it in front of me, I've seen the light bulb go on, in a young person's mind, it's really wonderful to see. And so arriving in my current role, I was really keen to really embed that there was pretty much nothing going on in my school in college. And so very quickly, as I mentioned, we have a lot of face to face events where I get lots of people to come into college, and whether that be big careers fairs or sort of speed networking events or talks. And the next step will be mentoring. We haven't got there yet, but I think mentoring's massively powerful. And so we've embedded it by lots of events. And we've also then gone further when unibuddy appeared. And you know, knowing what a fantastic tool that would be, as Elliott said, you know, first students to access that at any time and we in initially advertised it with students. But then actually I've learned along the way that unless you really show something to students and do it with them and give them the confidence that they know what it is, and actually see the power of how great it is, they're not going to go and use that they've got plenty of other distractions. And so we actually embedded it into our careers programme, so that we use it in sixth form. And you know, we set tasks based on it, they use it there and then and then we encourage them to continue to use that. We haven't used it with younger students as yet. I think the main reason is because the student has to create an accounts on there, and obviously our younger students under 16, that creates all sorts of kind of things in us making them do that as part of their schoolwork. And it could be something that we roll out to parents and actually encourage them to use it with that young person. But in the sixth form, it is fully embedded there. We also demonstrated it at our careers fair as well. Which actually got a lot of interest and a lot more usage, I think,

Ian, Unibuddy  22:04  
Certainly demonstrating the power of peer to peer there and being a real champion for unibuddy, peer to peer and Elliot I know you use it in various ways that the peer to peer and also, you kind of seen the power of it for quite quite a while now. So you're happy to share how you're kind of using peer to peer across your recruitment cycle and supporting students from your end?

Elliot, University of Leicester  22:23  
Yeah. And so when we first kind of started with using Unibuddy, which was March last year, and it was mainly we use the main chat function and kind of signposted lots of students towards that and across all of our kind of enquirer or applicant journey, making sure that if we were sending an email about something, whether it's accommodation or scholarships or something, it always be a reminder that if anyone's got any questions about that topic, they could speak to a student about it. And we started recently using the kind of live event function which allows a bit more kind of chat room event which is very exciting students to be able to talk to staff, particularly, as well as students. I think it's a really nice environment, and much more approachable environment than maybe writing an email having to pick up the phone for prospective students and, and you might see me kind of looking this way I'll just check checking out the latest analytic side of things on the on Unibuddy and looking at it over the last 10 months we can see it was kind of muddling along about 200 students a month signing up, which is, which is good, which is fine until February and March is gone right up, and April's gone even higher. But then you can really see over the last three months, the power or the power of peer to peer has almost kind of increased, maybe even tenfold for us, which I imagine is probably similar across lots of universities that use a similar platform. Just because it's now one of the main ways students can engage with the university. They can't visit,yet, So we've we've kind of upped our game a little bit in terms of promoting it as well. The inclusion of being able to chat to staff has really helped with that reassurance as well. As I mentioned earlier, we mention it and it basically everything we do because we know how important it is we know how school was using it as as Yvonne can be used as an example. And we know how valuable it can be currently. 

Ian, Unibuddy  24:14  
And have you seen any trends recently with the types of conversations and questions that changed quite a lot since COVID, has kind of come into people's consciousness. Have you seen any kind of trends in that sense?

Elliot, University of Leicester  24:23  
I think the looking particularly the live events I we've been interesting to see within our kind of digital offer holder days that how we've run we run through three since the middle of March. And you can see definitely a trend from the first one was very much. Lots of confusion was the kind of sense that everyone was giving. And it was kind of muddled questioning, and then that was fine.  It was kind of reassuring to see. April was a bit more like a case of what's happening with my exams. And I think that was pretty much the only thing people were asking about. And now actually the most recent one we've done, it was very much how's September looking. What's happening with starting my accommodation etc. So you can really see that most of the thought process of students going along in a kind of linear process. So, the general day to day questions have remained actually quite reassuringly similar in terms of what they are covering, and when will we kind of expect them to cover at this time of year, but then when it comes to particularly that the event side is definitely more... you can tell the students are pretty concerned, and quite rightly so. So it's again, that's why it's such a useful platform to be able to respond very quickly in a nice environment that everyone can see as well within the live events. And that's helped me. I guess the other way we've started doing things more with with the teacher audiences as well. So running a couple of web chats for teachers again, having a bit of a listen to what they're saying, having our admissions guys on there as well to kind of continue that and working together collaboration aspect that we've mentioned earlier.

Ian, Unibuddy  25:55  
Right across our platform recently reassurance has probably been the key word is this call still gonna run Is the university going to be open? We're still running courses. So that's definitely been a key thing we've seen, right across our platform. Probably the last two months Yvonne you touched upon unibuddy, and UCAS there quite nicely. Which brings us quite nicely into our final topic. So are you able to kind of give us an overview, maybe someone who's not familiar with unibuddy, and UCAS is? Are you happy to give us a bit of an overview of what Unibuddy on UCAS is? I know, Elliot, you're using it quite extensively as well. But from a schools perspective, are you able to give a bit of context about what Unibuddy and UCAS is?

Yvonne, Wooton Academy Trust  26:28  
Yeah. So I think UCAS kind of really nicely brings together quite a few tools now. And obviously one of those most recent ones is being able to chat to a student, which is obviously the unibuddy part of it. And I do think that students who are interested in university will tend to look at us as a natural kind of place to have a look. And they also we also have another system called unifrog which they use as well and a lot but you can use the natural kind of second place that they would be using a lot in that research process. I do think that students can be quite narrowly focused on things. So if unibuddy was perhaps hosted elsewhere, it would be another place for them to have to remember to go to. So as an advisor when I knew that Unibuddy and UCAS kind of linked up, and it was hosted on the UCAS website that I thought that was a brilliant thing for our students, because I thought it just more students would use it, you know, even if they weren't looking for it, even if they didn't know about it, they would still see it as part of their research and, and then naturally go on to use it. And, and I would really encourage advisors and teachers to use it as well. We can learn a lot from speaking to current university students. I've used it when I'm having meetings with young people. So, you know, I think I've, I've mentioned before that when I was speaking to a student who was worried about what the step up to degree level chemistry would be like, we just hopped on, chatted to a chemistry student there and then got his perspective about things that he'd found challenging. And that student walked away actually really reassured, which I never could have done in a million years because I don't even understand chemistry, let alone be able to reassure somebody about chemistry. And so I think having it hosted there on that you cast platform is it's just it's, I think it's perfect. I think it's great to be hosted there.

Ian, Unibuddy  28:29  
Elliot, from your point of view, I know you've been on there for quite a while now what kind of benefits have you seen from being on there? And obviously you're your student ambassadors are there on UCAS mixed in with other universities as well? So what kind of impacts have you seen from that?

Elliot, University of Leicester  28:41  
Well, I think for us as a university like Leicester we've got a pretty strong profile, but we know we're not as big as some of our sort of bigger mighty competitors. So actually, for when we when we first went live on the UCAS platform is an opportunity for us to engage with students before they may have even thought of going to University of Leicester and succeed at the moment. Before that, sorry, people had to come to the University website or have maybe met us at a fair, then be sent a link to then do engage with our students, which is another opportunity to reach out and across the globe really. And that was the interesting thing. One of the most interesting things I've found that looking at, again, some of the some of the stats from that side of things, I expected UK interest to be pretty, pretty high in terms of proportion across everyone, but actually, it's, it's not as high as I thought it'd be there's lots of interest from from all around the globe via the UK system. So again, it's not just an opportunity for us to reach out to UK students, it really is a kind of global pool which is which is great. And obviously that's kind of partly down to Unibuddy and also down to UCAS so it's a really good way of bringing those two powerhouses together, shall we say, and, but also looking at the subjects that are interested in we can then plan based on what we know that students are looking at, we can then plan our ambassador allocation on the platform kind of suit the needs of everyone that's on there. And this is a really good way of a engaging with the slightly broader market to then bring them potentially if they're interested in more information on the university as a follow up, so it's been really successful. I can see we've just gone past the thousand conversations mark. But no, it's really, really good. And as you as Yvonne were mentioning, with UCAS as a hub, I think it's a natural place people are going to visit those it makes sense for a university like ourselves to be tried to be front and centre that.

Ian, Unibuddy  30:29  
Yeah, I think you're right. I think when people think about applying to universities, researching universities, UCAS tends to be something that most students are familiar with. So I think having it on there, kind of giving it another kind of research tool and a place where they might be researching applying for other universities just kind of gives them that extra kind of impetus to say actually, maybe I'll think about this university as well. I wasn't aware of them or this course. So I think it's been a great innovative product for us. And I think it's helped universities and schools as well, from what based on what you said as well. That's we're kind of out of time now. So I just wanted to wrap up by saying thank you very much to Elliott from Leicester, and Yvonne from Wooton Academy Trust for your time today. And I think it's been really helpful from I've certainly enjoyed hearing your perspectives from the school and, and the university. I know that was quite a short session. But if anyone has got any questions, then feel free to reach out to us. And I think I would certainly be more than happy and I'm sure Elliot and Yvonne would be as well to answer any questions or any, any follow ups. But apart from that, thank you very much for joining us and stay safe and safe. Stay well.