The impact of Academic Skills Centres on retention, progression and attainment and improving student confidence

The Academic Skills Centres were implemented on all university campuses to provide tailored disciplinary support to students at Kingston University as part of the Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategy (Kingston University, 2009). The intervention aimed to extend and enhance existing support by ensuring that undergraduates and postgraduates on all of the university‘s campuses could access learning support that closely aligned with disciplinary criteria. In addition to providing a supportive academic resource, the intervention also aimed to improve the student experience of learning and teaching within the institution. Therefore, it incorporates a diverse and flexible range of learning and teaching strategies, to meet the increasingly diverse needs of students, in an environment of technological advances, alongside changes in expectations, approaches to learning, and learning styles. The Academic Skills Centres make a significant contribution to students‘ learning experiences by engaging them to become autonomous learners in an informal environment where they receive feedback on draft assignments and from this can practise and develop a range of skills such as essay and report writing, mathematics, referencing and researching, prior to submission. Thus, the overall aim of the Academic Skills Centres is to engage students as active participants in learning, teaching and assessment processes.