During the last two years, over two hundred and thirty providers of higher education have submitted Access and Participation Plans (APP) for approval to the Office for Students (OfS). Another forty-six are set to submit in the next six months.
In these new plans, providers lay out how they will improve equality of opportunity for students from disadvantaged backgrounds in accessing, succeeding in, and progressing from higher education. Some of these providers are now implementing their plans while others are preparing to do so in the coming year.
Having supported the drafting of the APPs at our respective institutions, we can confirm that providers committed significant resources, time and energy into developing plans, intervention strategies and activities with the aim of mitigating barriers to equitable opportunities for students.
We also spent time deciding how we would measure and evaluate the effect of our intervention strategies and activities against measures of student experiences and outcomes.
In the time between submitting our APPs and rolling them out, we paused to recuperate, assess the next steps, and then redirect the momentum and energy from writing the plans into implementing them – then evaluating intervention strategies and activities.
During this moment of pause, we had a realisation: we needed a space to come together, support each other, and grow both individually and as institutions to embrace the new challenges that come with our APPs.
The sector already has many organisations, groups, collectives and individuals who run evaluation workshops, create resources and support each other in evaluation activities.
However, the collaboration we desired was closer than the existing opportunities: we wanted to create a more agile and shared approach to evaluation. We wanted to understand ‘what works’ to improve student outcomes, create spaces to share lessons learned, receive feedback on plans and reports, and support one another as we work to professionalise evaluation work in higher education institutions.
For some time, University Alliance (UA) members have discussed the need for a group that brings together evaluation practitioners (professional and academic services) to support practice and increase collaboration.
In response to this demand, we formed the University Alliance (UA) Evaluation Network (UAEN): a collaborative group that explores, develops and supports evaluation activities related to student success, access, participation, learning and teaching at UA providers. The members consist of staff at UA providers who work in or are interested in evaluation and evidence-based intervention design and decision-making.
With this new group, we hope to provide a basis for the following types of initiatives:
- Identifying points for collaboration across UA members related to evaluation: including providing members with opportunities and spaces (online and in person) for discussion and engagement with each other; navigating complex regulatory requirements; and providing space for peer-to-peer support and feedback on evaluation plans and reports.
- Supporting professional development by: sharing knowledge, capabilities and skills; designing working meetings, presentations and inviting guest speakers to enrich our evaluation knowledge base and expand our toolkits. We are also developing a mentorship program to support those newer to evaluation in higher education.
- Undertaking joint evaluation projects and applying for evaluation funding opportunities related to student success, access, participation, learning and teaching.
- Triangulating findings to produce briefing papers for evidence-based intervention design and decision-making.
- Championing the benefit of evaluation, evidence-based intervention design and decision-making at UA providers and beyond by engaging proactively and positively with other sector evaluation groups, regulators and policymakers.
The expertise that we aim to develop through UAEN goes beyond our more immediate and pressing responsibilities in relation to our APP. Our ambition is to extend the benefits of our developing practice to help embed evaluation and evidence-based practice across our institutions.
By doing this we hope to meet our moral as well as regulatory responsibilities by ensuring that the activities and programmes that we ask our students and prospective students to participate in are valuable and a good investment of their often very limited free time.
These sweeping goals are not possible without participation from our dynamic, diverse and passionate UA members. In the spirit of the collaboration that brought us together, we would like to invite all staff from UA member universities to join our group, to discuss plans, learn skills, share resources and support each other.
You can join our UAEN group by contacting Dr Nathaniel Pickering (n.l.pickering@greenwich.ac.uk) or Dr Sierra Smucker (s.smucker@brighton.ac.uk) who can provide you with more information.
