Podiatry team win Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence
Innovative and impactful work by students in the local community has helped the University of Huddersfield’s Podiatry team to be recognised with a prestigious national education award.
Podiatry have been awarded a Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) by higher education charity Advance HE. The award celebrates the power of partnership and teamwork in delivering outstanding educational outcomes.
Students have delivered care to visitors at the Huddersfield Mission homeless centre, led by Senior Lecturer Neville Parker, while Leg Awareness Days (led by Dr Natasha Levy), run in conjunction with industry partners, have placed extra emphasis on the preventative power of podiatry to improve awareness of leg health among the public.
Study Podiatry at the University of Huddersfield
Strong links with the NHS have seen clinicians from local trusts act as lecturer practitioners, several of whom are Huddersfield alumni, to supervise current students in the practical delivery of care at the University’s podiatry clinic in the Daphne Steele Building.
Communities in Leeds and Bury, facilitated by Dr Grace Linsley and members of the team, also benefit from student-led clinics which have boosted delivery capacity within the NHS. These clinics have been recognised as a model of excellence for placement experience by NHS England.
The success for Podiatry has been achieved under the leadership of Dr Peter Roberts, Senior Lecturer Leah Asante and with support from Professor Georgina Blakeley, Strategic Lead for Teaching and Learning in Human and Health Sciences.
Students 'buddy up'
The team have welcomed student input and partnership in developing services and seeking improvements. Final year students support first years in a buddying system that underscores the collaborative nature of Huddersfield’s Podiatry offering.
It is the second CATE for the University in recent years, with the wellbeing service Get Set Goal having won a CATE award in 2024.
Dr Peter Roberts, Senior Lecturer in Podiatry and CATE project leader, says, “We are very pleased, this is an enormous achievement for us. Advanced HE are very keen on projects that have reach, impact and value, and we had a range of interlinked projects that were about community engagement and pushing podiatry forward.
“Part of this was us sending our students to work with homeless people in the Huddersfield Mission, where they helped people whose foot and leg health is often neglected. We joined forces with our technical colleague Nicky Dragicevic to innovate on how we could provide this valuable community service in an efficient and effective way.
“We’ve instigated student-led clinics in NHS settings across Yorkshire and into East Lancashire and worked with industry partners on events such as Leg Awareness Days to develop the educational pathways for students and give them real-world experience. Our aims have been to enhance clinical exposure for students and enrich delivery of podiatry in the community.
“A significant and highly impactful collaboration, led by Dr Andy Bridgen, was with the Royal College of Podiatry to establish national standards for training and regulation of podiatric surgery. This was groundbreaking work to support the growth of surgical podiatry across the country.
“The recognition of this prestigious CATE award from Advanced HE is thoroughly deserved for all the hard work, dedication, leadership and teamwork shown by our students and staff.”