For two years with my colleague Alicia Prowse at Manchester Metropolitan University we have been running a Office for Students (formerly Hefce) funded project to develop a cross institutional Personal Tutoring Framework.

We used Soft Systems Methodology as our theory of change and at the heart of the approach was a university wide conversation to find out about and agree the purpose of personal tutoring (PT) for students and staff.

Through finding out about personal tutoring, we discovered that our students were very adept at spotting an insincere offer – if it can not be resourced as personal, don’t pretend that it is!

When conceptualising PT, our framework suggest splitting it into designing the system of PT and the activity of PT across three domains of activity, the three C’s, course, community and career.