Philippa Holloway, Senior Lecturer DTA

This is a Proud to be Staffs Story Here at Staffordshire University Students' Union, our vision is that every student will be Proud to be Staffs. Our stories are examples of the wonderful people and groups in our community and how they make us proud.  Why not tell us what makes you proud? Click here to tell us your Story!

Proud to be Staffs Story: Philippa Holloway

Senior Lecturer | School of Digital Arts and Technologoes

"I must be circumspect in this narrative: some of what I know is confidential. In anonymised summary... On one day during term three, Philippa took a considerable amount of time out of her day at a busy period for academics' workload to provide front-line welfare and wellbeing assistance to a student who was in both acute hardship and significant distress. She ensured the individual student was able to tap into all relevant sources of support including the one for which I work (which is how I became aware of her intervention) in addition to freely and generous-spiritedly offering her own support. Her knowledgeable empathy and the strong relationship of trust she had clearly already built with that individual student before the day in question was in my view exceptional and thoroughly deserving of the highest possible praise. I have encountered that individual student on-campus since the day in question and if body language and demeanour are any indicator, she/he/they is now in a far better state of wellbeing. I cannot be completely certain that Philippa's actions that day 'definitely' rescued a student's academic career or minimised the impact of a welfare crisis event, but both those propositions are highly likely to be the case. In the course of my work, I see many cases in which University staff have been wonderful and thoroughly supportive (I also see a few where things have been regrettably different from that) but this event was well above and beyond what I am used to. It is fair to say my heart was touched."