Redesigning the SORA workflow on Portico

Overview

The Current Student product team is partnering with Registry and SSWS to redesign the Reasonable Adjustments on Portico process: the new process will go live in September 2025. This work is one workstream on UCL’s the Beyond the SORA programme.

We aim to minimise the SoRA manual administrative overhead so that time spent on this can be used more meaningfully to support our students. Our design and approach draws upon experience and lessons learnt from our ECs, DAPs and Change of Circumstances workflow redesign. We are consulting faculties throughout the design and development process via our RA on Portico Champions group. 

Recent progress

There will be three tiers of provisions to allow for standardisation where possible whilst still providing flexibility for students who need it.

We have recently shared the tier 1 / 2 provisions for each assessment type with faculties to share onwards with departments. Departments are invited to review these provisions for their assessments and flag any instances where the standard provisions are not appropriate to the assessment. In some instances, the reason that standard provisions are not appropriate will be due to the way that the assessment has been set up (the assessment type). There will be an opportunity to change the way these modules are set up in July as part of the post Exam Board window to confirm assessments for the coming year. Departments should make changes to assessment set up rather than amending / exempting standard provisions in these instances.

Faculties will review requests and log approved requests with us (by 4 July) and we will update Portico to reflect agreed exclusions / amendments where appropriate. 

Next steps

We are currently developing the tier 3 provisions / process and will share this with faculties and departments in due course.

Building on our first draft of the student workflow, we are working with the User Experience and Accessibility teams to ensure that our design meets industry standards and provides an accessible and inclusive student experience.

Over the coming weeks we will be designing and developing the SSWS and department / faculty parts of the workflow. We will consult faculties on this design through our RA on Portico Champions group.    

Key benefits of the new workflow

1. Standardised provisions

• There is currently no “standard offering” for SoRAs resulting in huge variance across provisions given and combinations of provisions.
• Standardising provisions will make it fairer for students and simpler for Departments to administer. This will reduce confusion and enable Departments and SSWS discussions to focus on the students who have additional / non-standard requirements.

2. More streamlined and consistent process for staff and students

• The current process relies on emails between students, Departments and SSWS with SoRAs stored as PDF files, often in multiple locations.
• The new process will be managed on Portico and staff (with correct access permissions) and students will be able to access the most recent SoRA via Portico. This will improve transparency, ensure the right users have access to the right information and significantly reduce time spent on process administration.

3. New reporting capability

• There has been a significant increase in Reasonable Adjustments in recent years (a sector-wide trend). Evidence shows that the number of RA requests are going to continue to increase in the coming years.
• The new workflow will allow UCL to monitor usage and trends, allowing us to understand requests AND usage and to plan to ensure that we meet the needs of our current and future students.

Process overview

The diagram below shows a high-level overview of the new process.

Tiers of reasonable adjustment provisions 

There will be three tiers of provisions to allow for standardisation where possible whilst still providing flexibility for students who need it. Students will be offered tier 1 provisions by default after they submit their SoRA and provide medical evidence. Based on current information, we anticipate that the majority of provisions will be tier 1 (approximately 80%). If a student feels that the standard tier 1 provisions do not meet their needs, they can request a meeting with SSWS to discuss their provisions. SSWS will meet these students to discuss their requirements and may decide that tier 2 (standardised pre-agreed enhanced provisions) or tier 3 (non-standard exceptional provisions) are required. Any tier 3 provisions must also be agreed with the department.  
 

Contact details for further information: currentstudent@ucl.ac.uk