The Centre for Professional Practice welcomes students from a wide variety of organisations.
To give you an indication we have people from administration,
from Human Resources, the voluntary sector, teaching, as well as health professionals.
Studying programmes with the Centre for Professional Practice
gives students the platform to gain academic validation and accreditation
for the skills and knowledge and experience that they've amassed in the
workplace, and also allows them to view their profession from a wider perspective.
Put simply, it allows individuals to broaden their academic and professional expertise
whilst gaining a recognised qualification.
The Professional Practice programmes, because they're built on a hub and spoke model,
this will permit individuals who've got a variety of aspirations to select from
across the University's vast catalogue. Programmes of study that are
going to build into a robust course that's going to stretch them while
they're achieving their undergraduate qualification or their postgraduate
qualification. And that programme, that course that they do, is going to be
tailored to meet their own individual needs.
There are core modules which are learning and development, evidence-based practice, interprofessional working and
research skills, and then our students get to choose from the optional modules
that are available.
Many of the modules are subject-specific to the programme of study
study and they may be something like advancing dental practice or
resource management in primary care. One module in particular which is a core
module is evidence-based practice and this module is particularly relevant to
the health care professions. This module teaches our participants how to identify
an area of their practice, how to search for evidence for that area of practice
to analyse an appraised at evidence and apply it back to their workplace.
This module really encourages lifelong questioning
skills and encourages each participant thoroughly interrogate their practice so
that when they go back to deliver their clinical practice to their clients - their patients -
they can take a gold standard approach.
All our programme directors meet with the students
that apply to do the programme and get a sense of where
they want to be in the direction they want to travel in terms of their career.
They then work with the student at the start and throughout the rest of the
course to ensure that that student is selecting programmes and modern modules
from across the University catalogue, which is across humanities or across
science or across social science. And the modules within that catalogue actually
join together to create something that is bespoke and enabling for the participant.
We also provide collaborative programmes, and that's
provision that we work with other organisations external to the University,
that enable that organisation or that employer to actually focus on some
of the strategic needs that they have and build their own programmes.
We deliver that with the organisation and with those employers or they deliver it on
their own and we actually carry out the quality assurance and the checks that
are required to reassure people about the high quality of education and
training that's going on beyond the University.
Students who study at the Center for Professional Practice, even though that study is part-time,
and even though they study with us at the weekends, they have access to all the facilities.
So, the library, the student learning advisory service, and also they have really
good interaction with us as tutors to support them through that process.
You can see a student by the time they've completed their programme that
they've gained confidence incredibly. They've moved from, often being quite shy,
in terms of being able to portray and to actually be critical and
understanding what critical means. So critical in terms of positive criticism
as well as negative criticism and how to deliver that. And you see them
going from lack of understanding to slowly developing the confidence and
doing that almost automatically by the time that they finish at the end.
And that's really reassuring for my colleagues and myself and we're
delighted and it would be great if we could get other
students to come in and participate, and encourage and support them to do the same.