Leigh Sparks

The impact of location on Higher Education (HE) is more important now than ever before. Whether students are remote, commute to campus or live and study there full time, universities have to foster an environment in which students can flourish.

GoodCourse Universities lead Kitty Hadaway sat down with Leigh Sparks, Deputy Principal of Education and Students at the University of Stirling, to discuss the effect of space on student experience and satisfaction, his career so far, and fostering a sense of belonging on campus.

Leigh's Journey

Kitty: Can you give me an introduction to your current role and institution?

I’m Leigh Sparks. I’m one of four deputy principals at the University of Stirling. I look after all of the university’s students, including student experience. The university was founded 1967 on a glorious 330 acre campus, today we have around 14,000 students. We’re well known for our innovation and are proud of the fact that the people here and the students we teach really make a difference to society and economy.

Kitty: What brought you to senior leadership and student responsibility?

I’ve been at Stirling for a long time — I came here in 1983 on a six month contract. I became head of a department, moved on to become the Dean of the management school, and then was asked in 2010 to be the founding head of the Stirling graduate school. After that, I became the deputy principal responsible for internationalisation, but I felt I was better suited to the Education and Students role. I’m interested in managing things, making a difference, and doing good for students. I was a quality assessor early on in my career, and have always been interested in that side of things — it all came together.

Kitty: With recent guests, we’ve been exploring the vital issues of student experience and discussing the need to foster a sense of belonging and inclusion on campus — particularly post Covid. What initiatives have you been working on to this end?

As a campus university we’ve always been interested in giving students a good experience. We’re relatively close to Glasgow and Edinburgh and have quite a few commuting students, so we were already thinking about distance pre-Covid.

We need to think beyond the functional aspects of place. People associate with places and need emotional spaces to work and play in — they shouldn’t just be transactional places of exchange, they’re areas that people need to want to spend time in. We think about that in our facilities — what does teaching look like, how can we make it engaging and inclusive, how can students make friends and enjoy a social life?

We bundle this around programmes, such as Be Connected, which is a programme that encourages students to engage with each other in many different ways. Now we are getting through Covid, students and staff value the opportunity to be engaged again and back on campus.

This has an interesting parallel with my academic work on retail and town centres and the nature of urban spaces and places. We have recently transformed the heart of the campus with new transport links, a sports centre and a central student-focused building in Campus Central, all focused on improving the quality of the space and encouraging interactions.

Kitty: You already mentioned that you were a founding head for graduate studies at the university — how does the fostering of belonging vary among the different types of student?

The biggest issue is around post-graduate students and their changing demographic. Immediately post-pandemic, our focus was more general, but this year we’re looking closely at graduate induction and inclusion — we need to tailor things to all our students. We have around 140 different nationalities on campus, so we need to embed internationalism throughout our university, and encourage cross-cultural experiences. We try to weave a theme of belonging and health and well-being, which will make their personal and academic lives much easier.

Kitty: Student safety is another big concern for many universities. What is your approach when it comes to making progress on crucial things like reducing incidents of sexual harassment on campus?

The complete university guide recognised Stirling as one of the safest places in the UK — which I think is testimony to the work that we’ve been doing for the past few years. We have an institutional Dean of EDI who’s well known for her work in this area. We have had a gender based violence strategy for quite a few years, agreed with the Students Union and the university, and there has been a lot of work on awareness and training — not just for students, but for staff and senior management as well.

Kitty: Student engagement is also a challenge — where do you currently see students engaging the most and the least?

There was a clear shift during the Covid periods. But so far this semester, both our academic and social sides have seen much more engagement. On the teaching side, when Covid struck we very quickly put everything online. Since then, we’ve kept a lot of lectures online but we’ve boosted small group F2F teaching. Our students said that lectures were better suited online, but in-class engagement with academics and peer-to-peer discussions is what students really want.

Kitty: Student engagement is also a challenge — where do you currently see students engaging the most and the least?

There was a clear shift during the Covid periods. But so far this semester, both our academic and social sides have seen much more engagement. On the teaching side, when Covid struck we very quickly put everything online. Since then, we’ve kept a lot of lectures online but we’ve boosted small group F2F teaching. Our students said that lectures were better suited online, but in-class engagement with academics and peer-to-peer discussions is what students really want.

During the pandemic we spend the best part of £23 million on building a new heart of the campus for student engagement and study. We made it more collaborative and are currently reimagining our teaching spaces to make those more collaborative, too.

Kitty: You’ve been at Stirling for a long time — in that time, what would you say you’re most proud of?

The growth in confidence over the past decade. Stirling has always been innovative, but it used to hide its light under a bushel. Now you get the collective sense that this is a really good university for teaching, learning and research and where students and staff can have a great experience — both academically and socially.

3 Quickfire Questions

Kitty: What’s your top piece of advice for anyone coming into the HE space?

Make sure you focus on the students.

Kitty: Who most inspires you in the HE space?

I wouldn’t want to identify one person, but there are some really good leaders across the sector as a whole, which isn’t as appreciated as it might be by government.

Kitty: What’s the most important book or piece of literature you’ve read that has influenced your career to date?

It depends how you define important. If I take it as significant, then it was something I read when I was an undergraduate. I went on a summer vocational exchange to Australia. I worked in a planning department, where I was set a project to look at the market for a new regional shopping centre. I read some material on retailing by John Dawson as part of my work in the department, which excited me. When I returned to the UK, I saw an advert for a PhD working with John Dawson and started my PhD in retail because of it. That led to my academic career.

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