Who is my Personal Tutor & what do they do?

Your Study Abroad tutor is an academic member of staff with your department who provides guidance and support to study abroad students at King’s. 

Each department has an academic member of staff appointed to the role of Study Abroad Tutor; you can find a full list of the departmental study abroad tutors at Study Abroad tutors.

Some online distance learners have a Student Success Advisor rather than a Personal Tutor. While both roles share similarities, the Student Success Advisor is specifically focused on providing you pastoral support with a coaching approach. This is focused on your success and wellbeing during your studies, rather than academic guidance.

You can find resources at Student Support for Online Learners, and you can find the list of programmes where students are supported by Student Success Advisors on the King's Digital pages. You can find out about your Student Success Advisor team from the Welcome emails sent to you, or by speaking with your faculty for any additional information.

Please speak with your programme team if you're not sure whether this applies to your course, or if you have any further questions about personal tutoring on your online programme.

Your personal tutor will:

• Provide a first point of contact for support & guidance for you in your department/faculty

• Be an academic, clinical or professional services staff member with various responsibilities

• Discuss your academic progress

• Signpost you to specialist support services, where appropriate

• Support your future planning

• Encourage extra/co-curricular involvement to build your community an engage with King's and London

• Write references

Your department (or in some cases, your individual programme) also has a Senior Tutor, or an equivalent.

Senior Tutors are responsible for ensuring that there is a robust system for personal tutoring within each department, in accordance with King’s policy. They can also act as a point of contact for students whose Personal Tutor is temporarily unavailable

If you don't know who your Senior Tutor is, please speak with your programme team.

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In most cases your personal tutor will support you from induction through to graduation.

In some cases, however, it will be necessary for you to be allocated a new personal tutor. This could be because your personal tutor goes on a period of sabbatical or other leave, because they move to a new role, or because they retire.

If your personal tutor does change, your new personal tutor will make every effort to get to know you as soon as possible – and you are encouraged to be proactive in getting to know them, too.​​​​​

No – personal tutors are only assigned to ‘taught’ students, which are undergraduate and postgraduate taught students. Postgraduate research (PGR) students have instead their Supervisor who fulfils this equivalent role.

For details around this, please refer to the information in Postgraduate Researchers: Getting started.​​​​​​