Call for evidence: national strategy for access and student success

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Who do we want to hear from?

• Higher education institutions
• Further education colleges
• Schools
• Other organisations involved in widening participation to higher education (for example, third sector organisations and professional bodies)

Why do we want this information?

We wish to build on the progress made to date in the sector to widen participation in higher education and to draw on the considerable knowledge and expertise within the education sector.

This call for evidence is one in a number of our work strands that will provide a robust evidence base.  

The evidence provided will help us to:

• demonstrate the impact of WP activities
• provide a narrative around the considerable investment in widening access and student success
• inform the development of the national strategy.

What are we looking for?

We are looking for robust evidence about effective approaches and practices in widening access and ensuring success across the student lifecycle. The evidence may be qualitative, quantitative or a mixture of both, and should have been evaluated. 

The evidence should be submitted under the headings shown on the call-for-evidence form. Responses can be broken down where appropriate under several headings. This will allow us to categorise and analyse responses more effectively. Not all sections need to be completed. 

The response to OFFA’s previous call for evidence of 22 November 2012 was excellent and we wish to thank all respondents again for their submissions. We are now looking to build on this body of evidence, which is largely concerned with outreach activities to schools and colleges.

To help address areas where we have fewer examples of the work institutions are doing, we would especially welcome examples of the following types of activity:

• approaches to evidence-based curriculum development to support WP and student success
• work to aid progression from HE to employment and/or postgraduate study
  • specific activity to address retention
  • approaches to pastoral elements of student support
  • collaborative work with charities, social enterprises and the not-for-profit sector
  • collaborative work between universities and colleges, locally, regionally and nationally
  • outreach work targeted at mature and part-time students.

We would also find examples of the following useful:

• how your widening participation work interfaces with your equality and diversity agenda
• approaches to the evaluation and monitoring of your outreach/student success schemes.

What will we do with it?

When the response phase has closed we will analyse the responses we have received. We will identify common themes and issues to inform the development of the national strategy, and to pull out the outstanding examples of widening participation activity.

These exemplars may stand out for a number of reasons including, but not limited to: results, audiences, innovation, evaluation methodology. We aim to produce a report on our findings, and are likely to complete this after the strategy is delivered to Government in the autumn.

Respondents should be aware that some of the evidence that is submitted may be used in the final report as case studies. Organisations should, therefore, only submit responses they will be happy to see in the public domain. We will check the final drafting of such case studies with the institution before publication.

Further guidance

In responding to this call for evidence it would be helpful for respondents to structure their response around the following areas (in any order):

• Evaluation and management; which should consider:
  • What were the critical success factors?
  • What evaluation methodology was put in place to measure success?
  • What were the key findings?
  • How was the analysis of the scheme used to develop it further, or how might this be done in future?
  • Why and how have you made changes at a strategic level to support widening participation activity? For example, what structure have you put in place to manage the relationship between HEIs, schools, colleges, communities, employers and so on? What impact do these relationships have on recruitment and the shaping of HE provision?
• Outcomes; which should consider:
  • What was the activity designed to achieve?
  • Were there broader, unforeseen benefits?
  • Were there activities or elements of activities that did not produce the anticipated level of benefits?
• Types of activity:
  •  We are particularly interested in information about target groups as well as descriptions of the particular activity. 

To keep burden to a minimum we are happy for respondents to email examples of evidence that has already been written up to national.strategy@hefce.ac.uk or national.strategy@offa.org.uk, or to point us to (or update) examples submitted in OFFA’s previous call for evidence of 22 November 2012. To help us with the volume of information we will receive, please keep responses to no more than 4 sides of A4. We will contact respondents if we need further information or clarification.

Page last updated 14 March 2013