You Said, We Listened | The School of Dental Sciences

Your feedback on your student experience, teaching, and learning is very important to us.

As a student at Newcastle University, we want you to know the channels through which you can provide us with feedback so we can improve your experience with us.

Here, we’ve provided some examples of the great work being done within the School of Dental Sciences to represent you.

The Importance of Feedback

Providing feedback on your course will not only allow us to help improve your experience but will also help you gain vital skills to help you in your future career. When giving feedback at university level, you’ll gain the confidence to raise any issues you may come across in the working world.

This is especially helpful for those studying on clinical-based courses, such as within the School of Dental Sciences. In a patient-focussed career, you need to have the confidence to speak out for the patients’ best interests. In the School of Dental Sciences, representatives from the NHS, tutors in professionalism, and qualified dentists are brought into the feedback loop, to help you gain confidence in providing feedback in the workplace.

Recording Representative Activity

Whilst the feedback loop and Student Staff Committees are not a new aspect of the student experience, one Student Representative within the School of Dental Sciences, Matthew, implemented a system to record activity relating to feedback.

Using ‘IDentity’, the system used regularly within the School, students can record any activity they get involved in, such as meetings, consultations, and forums. The activity can then be seen and commented on by tutors and supervisors.

Matthew’s suggestion has improved the Student Representative journey, giving students a bigger incentive to make positive changes, and this system has been in use for multiple years now.

Compulsory Stage Lectures

In the School of Dental Sciences, there’s an emphasis on responding to your feedback, whether changes can be made or not. The School hosts compulsory stage lectures, where staff look at the feedback given in the regular evaluation surveys and report back on the work being done to improve the student experience.

Representing you Fairly

Fair representation is very important to us, so we like to make sure that we receive feedback from under-represented groups. For a few years, the School of Dental Sciences have appointed Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion representatives, and the recruitment process has been improved to allow students to settle into life at University before signing up. Current School Reps have been approaching students in later stages who are perhaps more comfortable in voicing their concerns and ideas now than they were at the beginning of their University experience.