Attendance
Attendance Expectations
We expect you to fully engage with your studies and to take responsibility for your own learning in order to succeed in your degree.
- Students are required to attend all formal teaching sessions, including lectures, seminars, workshops, field trips and supervisions. Students are also required to attend any meetings requested by the department or other parts of the university.
- Our taught courses are demanding and intensive. Normally full-time students are expected to devote the equivalent of a 37.5-hour week to each week of their studies, including reading, research and preparation time, not just lectures, seminars and workshops.
- Attendance is governed by University Regulation 36, which sets out requirements for registration, enrolment, attendance and progress. It includes expectations of students and information on penalties that may be imposed if these are not met.
- In History, attendance at seminars is recorded and is the basis of most of your monitoring points. Attendance at lectures is not recorded.
If you are not able to attend a meeting or seminar:
- You should let the relevant staff member know. Send apologies and a brief explanation (you do not need to give details) in advance if you are not able to attend a teaching session or a meeting, and say when you think that you are likely to be back in attendance. If you have ongoing health issues or other circumstances that are preventing you from fully engaging with your studies, you should speak with your personal tutor.
- Religious Observance: If you need to miss a seminar for religious observances (e.g. Jews who observe Shabbat), please inform your seminar tutor as soon as possible. If your timetable means that you would miss classes on a regular basis for religious observance, please contact the History Office who, where possible, will reallocate you to a different seminar group.
Lecture Capture
The majority of lectures in History will be recorded. This is part of our inclusive access to teaching, and is intended to assist students to review any key points following the lecture. It is not a replacement for attending the lecture itself. For more on our inclusive approach to teaching, see our page on Support for Disabled Students.
If your class is cancelled:
- Occasionally, staff will need to reschedule a seminar due to illness or other unavoidable commitments. We will make every effort to find a time when all students in the group are available. If a lecture has to be cancelled, it may not be possible to reschedule it due to timetabling constraints, but we will provide the information in another format.
NEW: Registering your Attendance on Card Readers
From 2026/27, the University has introduced a new way for you to register your attendance at teaching sessions.
For seminars, you should tap your University Student ID card on the card reader as you enter the room.
Please note: it is not necessary for you to tap your card as you enter lectures.
We will still be registering attendance manually alongside this new system, so if you forget your card, or the reader isn't working, please let your seminar tutor know.
If you are a joint honours student or are taking modules in another department, please check the expectations of that department.
For further information, please see the University Guidance on Registering Attendance.
Timetables
You will be able to find your timetable on Tabula. Please be aware that the University does not finalise its central timetable until late summer/early September. The History department will not be able to give you the information in advance when lectures or seminars for specific modules are timetabled.
You should be available to have teaching anywhere in the teaching day:
- Monday 09:00-19:00
- Tuesday 09:00-19:00
- Wednesday 09:00-13:00
- Thursday 09:00-19:00
- Friday 09:00-18:00
Seminar Sign-Up
You will be invited to sign up for seminars on Tabula at the start of term. This enables you to build a timetable that suits you. Please pay attention to your other teaching sessions to avoid clashes. Your full timetable will be available once seminar sign-up is complete. The department tries to be flexible with seminar groups, but ultimately we reserve the right to move students to other groups when necessary (e.g. if a particular group is under or oversubscribed, or any students have clashes).
If you have any issues with your timetable, for example, if you think there is something missing or you have a clash, please contact the History Office.
If you are a joint honours student or are taking a module outside of history, please note that timetabling arrangements and seminar sign-up may differ. Contact that department for more information.
Monitoring Points
To help us to gauge how successfully you are engaging with your course, identify any problems which you may be experiencing and offer support to help you, the department has a number of check points throughout the year. If you miss any of the points, this might indicate that you are having problems with the course and need additional support. These monitoring points are available to see on Tabula.
It is extremely important that you meet the requirements of each point as failure to do so could result in a letter being sent to you from Student Records reminding you of your obligations as a student.
International students should be aware of their immigration responsibilities, and should be particularly aware of the consequences of missing contact points: the Academic Office is obliged to report to the Home Office UK Visas and Immigration (formerly the UK Border Agency) if any student visa holders have been found not to be engaging with and attending their degree course. This will normally lead to the curtailment of their visas.
Please speak to your Personal Tutor if you feel you might be at risk of not meeting these critical requirements at any point during your University career.
How to Record Attendance at Meetings or Supervisions
As a student, you can create a meeting record with your personal tutor/dissertation supervisor via the following steps.
- Go to Tabula > 鈥淢y Student Profile鈥�
- Select the ''Personal tutor鈥� or ''Dissertation Supervisor'' tab
- Select the button 鈥淩ecord meeting鈥�
- Enter the information that Tabula prompts you to include. This could include the participants of the meeting, the date and time, and that the title of the meeting was 鈥榩ersonal tutor meeting鈥� or 'dissertation supervisor meeting'. If your meeting is a monitoring point, the most critical information is the date/time of the meeting and the format of the meeting. Tabula requires meetings to be in the correct week(s) and to be face-to-face or video conference meetings in order to automatically update the relevant student鈥檚 monitoring points.
- Submit for approval. This will send the details of the meeting to your tutor/dissertation supervisor who will then approve or decline the meeting (for example if the date of the meeting is incorrect). Once the tutor/dissertation supervisor approves the meeting, your attendance record will be updated.