Assigning Personal Tutors using Portico –
Staff User Guide
1. What is the UCL Personal Tutoring System?
The purpose of a personal tutoring system is to provide each student with at least one member of staff who
gets to know them as individuals, who keeps an eye on their overall academic progress and who is
concerned for their general welfare. Information, guidance and support for Personal Tutors can be found at:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/personaltutors
Other useful resources:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ppd - Personal and Professional Development website
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ppd/personal_tutors - Advice for personal tutors on using the Personal and
Professional Development (PPD) system in tutorials
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/personaltutors/guidance/formats/PPD - PPD guide for personal tutors on the
Personal Tutors Handbook website
2. Why use Portico to assign Personal Tutors?
A student’s Personal Tutor takes an overarching view of their learning and development, as well as being a
point of contact and referral for pastoral matters. It is common for a student to ask their Personal Tutor for
a written reference, for advice about course options in the light of career aspirations and/or for other
developmental guidance. UCL has built up a range of resources (see links above) to assist students and their
tutors in these areas, in particular the PPD functionality in Portico for students to plan and track their
development of personal and professional skills and attributes alongside their academic study. A student’s
Personal Tutor can view† the trajectory of these recordings as a resource in writing references, giving general
advice and/or planning individual tutorial sessions. For these benefits to be available to both parties,
students must be linked to their Personal Tutor in the Portico database. Therefore departments are
strongly encouraged to use the process described below, rather than internal systems, to record and update
student allocation to Personal Tutors.
3. Using Portico to assign Personal Tutors
As part of the changes to the Personal and Professional Development system, updates have been made to
the way Personal Tutors are assigned to make it quicker and more intuitive. This guide aims to work through
the steps to successfully assign personal and departmental tutors to groups of students.
Log in to Portico. Select My Portico section on the left to access the Personal Tutors container. If there is no
Personal Tutors container, check with your department administration or Portico Services about level of
access. Please note that access level 2 for the Student Personal Details role is required. This can be
requested from the relevant Head of Department
† The Departmental Tutor can also view these records if needed for any reason. Click on Personal tutor(s): assignment. This will bring you to a search screen that will allow you to apply filters in
order to select the students you wish to assign to personal and/or departmental tutors.
The search is limited to undergraduate and taught post graduate students belonging to the staff’s department
with status of Enrolled, Yet to Enrol, Enrolled Debtor, Resitting, Time Limited Enrolled, Out of Attendance,
Interrupting Debtor, Suspended Debtor, Left – Resitting, Not Enrolled - progress uncertain, Enrolled with
sanctions, Pre-enrolled and Interrupting - Resitting (Final Year).
For the purposes of this guide we have searched using the programme code, but you may prefer to filter with
additional fields as well. Once you have entered your search criteria, click on Search. This will result in a selection
from the student database (in this case, 325 students – redacted for anonymity in the illustration).
Assigning a Departmental Tutor
Using Portico you can quickly and easily assign the same departmental tutor to all the students the database has
retrieved. (If you do not want to assign the same departmental tutor to all the students please follow the
instructions for allocating personal tutors, substituting Update departmental tutor from the drop-down menu.)
At the bottom of this page you will see the following box:
1. Select ‘Update departmental tutor’
2. Click ‘All’
This will take you through to a new screen where you will be asked for the Departmental Tutor’s UPI
Once the UPI has been entered, click Continue.
This will take you through to a screen confirming assignment of the tutor to the students listed:
This will prompt you to use the back button (1) to return the database of students.
***Please note, once you return to the database the Departmental Tutor assignment will not be displayed until you refresh the page.
Assigning Personal Tutors
The next stage is to assign personal tutors. It is very unlikely that one personal tutor will be responsible for all
the students in a department so a more selective approach is required.
Using the tick boxes on the left hand side of the database select the names of all the students, over multiple
pages, to be assigned to one of your personal tutors. Once you have selected all the students using this method
scroll to the bottom of the page you are on:
This time select Update personal tutor (1) and click on Current (2). This will take you to a screen requiring the
personal tutor’s UPI to be entered.
Once the tutor’s UPI has been entered click Continue to take you through to a confirmation screen:
Select the ‘Back’ button as above to return to the student database.
***Please note, once you return to the database the Personal Tutor’s allocation not have updated until you refresh the page.
Work through this same process for assigning other students to their respective personal tutors.
If you need any further help or have any questions please email: personaltutors-support@ucl.ac.uk