A collaborative approach to meet regional need
The Go Higher West Yorkshire (GHWY) Uni Connect (UC) programme has supported over 14,000 individual learners from underrepresented groups (URGs) to make better informed choices about their future since 2017 through strategic outreach projects. During this time, we have refined a collaborative approach to URG work that understands our local region’s needs. This has been underpinned by delivery evaluation and purposeful research.
A consortium of 13 higher education (HE) providers in West Yorkshire, GHWY aims to reduce inequalities in higher education access and success. GHWY delivers the UC programme in West Yorkshire
We have collaboratively developed sustained and progressive outreach programmes for a number of URGs in HE.
In this blog we explore how we developed these programmes and their impacts on learners in West Yorkshire.
Context for our work
Our region has a lower than national progression to HE. According to West Yorkshire Combined Authority’s Data Dashboard, there is also an unprecedented number of NEET (not in education, employment or training) learners and lower than national Level 2 attainment. Given this context, it is fair to say our learners are starting from an uneven playing field.
To help address this inequity, we took the approach of collaboratively analysing Access and Participation Plans (APPs) with our members to identify which sector risks underrepresented learners in our region face, combined with an understanding of need through relevant network engagement and other Uni Connect Partnerships’. This contextual information, paired with demographic school and college data, led us to identify males on Free School Meals and Black, Asian and minoritised ethnic learners, disabled learners and care experienced learners as priority URGs.
A collaborative, iterative approach routed in action-research
We offer multi-intervention outreach programmes to our target schools and colleges to learners in Year 8 - 13 delivered by our expert UC Outreach staff who feel passionate about supporting learners from URG groups. This enables us to meet the aims of our funders, the Office for Students (OfS) to, “Equip young ... learners from underrepresented groups to make an informed choice about their options ...and to minimise the barriers they may face.”
The programmes were developed iteratively over eight years’ delivery, refining the approach through impact reports and engaging with academic research.
Our varied and extensive URG programme includes a comprehensive CPD programme including the ‘Empowering Boys Voices’ conference, which brought together experts such as Dr Alex Blower (Arts University Bournemouth) and Mark Roberts (author and educator). We also presented about the impacts of ‘Go Higher Presents’ at the Equity in Education Conference at York St John University.
Impactful, evidence-based outreach programmes including 'Speak Up, Your Voice Matters' and Go Higher Presents which involve learners developing their self-efficacy skills and engaging in exciting activities such as photography and visiting HE campuses. Engaging with academics at conferences enabled us to understand the needs of learners more deeply. As a result, our Speak Up, Your Voice Matters project became focused on a strengths-based creative methods approach that incorporated Taking Boys Seriously Principles These included collaborating with an education project called the Rap School to help learners express themselves in creative ways.
In contrast, the creative method of delivery for our Go Higher Presents project is through podcasting. This facilitates interviews between student ambassadors and learners to create safe spaces to have conversations about race, equity and education.
Evaluation is threaded throughout programme design, GHWY’s evaluation outcomes framework is used to identify which outcomes we are intending to influence through programme delivery in order for us to measure the impact on learners who participate.
We co-created a theory of change for each URG programme to enable evaluation outcomes to underpin learning activity design. For example, an evaluation outcome ‘understand others' influence on own decision making’ was developed into activity around how learners make the choices they do.
Recognising staff barriers to delivery
We recognise the barriers our staff may have around delivering our programme of activity, such as lack of perceived confidence of working with some underrepresented learners due to their own positionality or life experience. To overcome these, we secured partial funding from Advance HE’s Collaborative Development Fund 2023-24 to deliver Cultural Competency Training.
Some concepts we learned in these training sessions have been embedded into the post-16 programme for Go Higher Presents, including John Burnham’s Social Graces Model, 1993. This helps learners to consider their positionality in line with making decisions.
How we embed evaluation into the programmes
We commissioned the Brilliant Club to evaluate our outreach programme. This met the OfS’s requirements to ‘contribute to a stronger evidence base around ‘what works’ in higher education outreach and strengthen evaluation practice across the sector.’
Our ‘Speak Up, Your Voice Matters’ and ‘Go Higher Presents’ programmes embed student ambassadors as role models. These are matched via their characteristics to the programme they deliver. Most of the URG programmes use podcasting as a medium to facilitate trusting conversations between role models and learners about HE and challenges they may identify.
The report acknowledged that, based on participant feedback, “the format of creating a podcast with student ambassadors was an effective way of engaging learners in an activity that exposed them to role models.” (pg 24).
Another key finding from the report was the importance for all URG learners to, “have sustained engagement in outreach activities” (pg 30). This underpins our rationale for the outreach programmes to have three sessions, with an additional launch session to help the cohort gel (as learners are selected due to their characteristics, they may not know one another).
Outreach programmes’ impact
Our programme has had wide-reaching impact on:
Learners: Based on participant feedback, the Brilliant Club found that our podcasting session was, “unanimously positive. One learner shared: ‘It gave me a different view of higher education. It made it seem not like [...] something that’s gonna be really boring and annoying. It made it seem like something we would enjoy to do and we would love to contribute our time to doing’.”
Staff: Student ambassadors and our own staff are more confident in delivering programmes. We have developed a reflective culture in which we collaboratively review delivery and programme design.
GHWY members: We benefit from economies of scale in collaboratively developing and delivering outreach programmes. Some of these activities are included in our members’ APPs and we use staff and resources from across our membership to deliver the project.
Discover more
If you would like to explore our URG learning materials further, please visit the GHWY website. If you would like to discuss our programme or evaluation findings, email us ghwy@leeds.ac.uk
Jenny Scannell, Associate Fellow, PGCE is a Project Manager and Officer for the West Yorkshire Uni Connect Partnership, Go Higher West Yorkshire Uni Connect. She leads on Underrepresented Group work and the CPD programme.