Author name: Connor

APP Evaluation or: How I learned to stop worrying and love failure I love evaluation because I’m always interested in how we might be able to improve things for people, whether that’s our students, our staff, our sector colleagues, or of course society at large. I also love WP because it’s emancipatory and life changing […]

New Access and Participation Plans: How can we take advantage of the time we have? As the dust settles on the mass variation process for Access and Participation Plans (APPs) our collective minds across the sector are beginning to focus on what’s next. We know when John Blake announced the variation process that we’d need

Show FACE your Grit Image By Dave Lowe It was during a coffee break, under a gazebo, on the lawn outside the FACE conference at the University of Southampton back in June, that Grit ran into Vice Chair Deirdre Lynskey. She suggested we might join FACE. But, before I go any further, let me make

Photo: Tim Mossholder Faith and Belonging We want every student to feel that they are part of our community, accepted for whoever they are, whatever their background, so that they stay and thrive in their university journey. But in an institution like ours, which has a diverse student population numbering around 30,000, creating a sense

Redefining access to higher education? Image by: Alice Donovan Rouse At QAA’s Access to HE conference in May 2022 Shakira Martin, Head of Student Experience at Rose Bruford College and former NUS President 2017-2019, presented the keynote. She shared her journey into and through education and explained that in preparing her speech she had had

Creative, Collaborative, and Cost-effective: The New Era of Widening Participation Evaluation Image M. Comoy Evaluation is a critical tool needed for improvement. As educators, we encourage pupils to evaluate their learning and reflect on what they learned, what went well and how they could improve. Evaluation of the impact of our Widening Participation (WP) programmes

How creative ideas can attract funding to support Social Mobility Photo by Arisa Chattasa Are you aware there are a range of funding opportunities available to potentially support widening participation and student success initiatives within the sector? The Government has recently announced three funding opportunities which higher education institutions (HEIs) can access directly and indirectly.

Induction for a post-Covid generation Image by – Nathan Dumlao Part of my role as Director of Student Participation and Success for the University of Hertfordshire’s Law School is to plan and deliver inductions for the various undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. As Covid ravaged the in-person student experience the last few years, students have reported

The case for value for money in widening participations: have we been here before? When it comes to evaluating the success of access and participation interventions the Office for Students (OfS, 2022a, n.p.) has stated an intention to challenge providers to ‘demonstrate value for money’. However, how this is defined and what this involves remains

A SIG is born: Reflections on the establishment of the APP Special Interest Group Reflections on Setting up and Developing a Student Panel in the Centre for Student and Community Engagement (CenSCE) at Nottingham Trent University (NTU): Some Guidance for Fellow Listeners… We are a department tasked with driving forward the institution’s widening participation and