IT’S A WRAP 

Seamless student journey – fact or fiction?  

Authors: Jean Mutton and Christine Stewart 

Abstract

In this final chapter, we explore the concept of a ‘seamless’ student journey, drawing on our combined 50-plus years’ experience of implementing process improvement in the Higher Education sector. We describe how over time we have gathered a lot of feedback from students and practitioners working in the sector (both academic and professional services staff) to confirm, challenge and explore potential barriers and opportunities to transformational change. We reflect on the themes which have emerged in this book, and we describe how we crowd-sourced a discussion, captured on Padlet, as a valuable means to ensure that our own assumptions about the enablers and blockers to effective and sustainable change in HE were either confirmed or challenged.  
The chapter ends with a summary of our findings and the conclusion that whilst the sector has moved significantly in recent years towards designing better staff and student experiences through human-centred approaches, it still has some way to go. 
prototype chapter

Authors

Jean Mutton

Following a degree in Educational Research, Jean began a career in Higher Education academic administration where she managed many Registry and Faculty-based administration teams, covering the student journey from Admissions to Graduation. Since 2015, Jean has been working as a consultant across the sector, using human-centred design for process improvement to enhance the student and staff experience. Jean is a co-founder of the Service Design in Education network.

Christine Stewart   

Christine is a lean, continuous improvement specialist with over thirty years of experience in various sectors. For the last seventeen years she has been using lean methodology to provide advice, facilitation and training to institutions helping them harness the skills and capabilities of their people, engaging them in developing and delivering a strategy for improvement and building ownership of their daily activities to make continuous improvement the norm.