How to Support Underrepresented Students
Whether it’s ensuring fair access to admissions, tailoring student experience or addressing attainment gaps, higher education providers are increasingly asked to deliver interventions to widen participation. As the Office for Students (OfS) introduces renewed expectations on access and participation planning, institutions are under pressure to devise, execute and evaluate these plans on a largely independent basis.
Yet this is not a straightforward process. Contextual factors affecting students who are traditionally underrepresented in university cohorts are consistently evolving. Similarly, widening participation rests not on creating fair access for one, homogenous group of underrepresented students. Rather, it demands recognition of the multiple axes of exclusion students might face, including socioeconomic background and ethnicity, and the intersections between these categories.
This blog post offers guidance on how to support underrepresented students in this challenging context.
School Partnerships
Admissions processes are key to understanding why certain social groups are underrepresented in higher education. The new OfS conditions of registration for Access and Participation plans understand that the attainment gap between students from low-income families begins early, often from primary education, and is persistent.
Institutions are increasingly encouraged to engage with the schooling system to provide support in those early years, building mutually beneficial partnerships. Here, targeted interventions are crucial, and we see a notable example arising from the University of Bournemouth. Their Books and Stories programme delivers 10 weekly one-hour sessions to primary school students who are underachieving in terms of their reading age in the local area.
Programmes like Bournemouth’s underline the importance of devising a partnership that is beneficial to the targeted schools. Some institutions experience difficulties in getting schools to engage. This can be addressed by ensuring you understand the needs of the target schools in question. Ask: what is this school lacking by way of resources and opportunities, and what can my institution offer in support?
Universities can support underrepresented students by engaging with them before entry and encouraging them to apply through school partnership programmes.
For further guidance, see our blog article on developing successful school partnerships.
Contextual Admissions
Contextual applications are a key topic in the debate on widening participation in UK universities and in the question of how to support underrepresented students.
When a student submits a contextual application, they provide expanded information about their background. This could include indicating that they have caring responsibilities, have experienced significant disruption to their education, or if their postcode ranks highly on the Index of Multiple Deprivation. Then, the student might receive a contextual offer that is 1 or 2 grades below the ‘normal’ offer the institution might expect to make for a given course.
Consistent review coupled with other measures is necessary to ensure the intervention is serving its target audience. Transparency is key here, and institutions should be clear in stating precisely how their contextual admissions process works. The University of York, for example, sets out the criteria for the process and precisely what is expected of students on their website.
This need for constant review means it’s always good to think about policies that can be implemented as alternatives to contextual admissions. Awareness of T-Level qualifications, taken up disproportionately by underrepresented students, might be one way of doing this. Increasing awareness of these qualifications in your admissions process and making it clear in your communications that it meets your admissions criteria is crucial.
Effective Feedback
Widening participation work doesn’t stop after entrance to the institution. An ever-increasing number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds are seeking and attaining places at higher education institutions across the UK. Despite this, only one in six students report feeling satisfied with their experience.
Consider how you might include students in the process of designing your feedback services. If you have low participation in your feedback cycle, conduct surveys and speak to representatives to discern why students aren’t engaging. By co-producing your services alongside your students, you can ensure that the feedback you receive is honest and comprehensive.
You should also adapt your student feedback services over time, as concerns regarding student satisfaction will change with new contexts, especially among disadvantaged students. Review your cycle regularly to ensure efficiency and effectiveness, and that students feel comfortable sharing their experience with you.
By listening to feedback from underrepresented students, you can adapt your approach and effectively support them throughout their student journey.
Mental Wellbeing
Evidence clearly highlights that disadvantaged students are more likely to be affected by poor mental health. So, it's an area in which underrepresented students need more support from their university.
Research shows that mental health issues remain underreported, especially among disadvantaged students. How can you ensure that underrepresented students are aware of the mental health provisions available to them? Making sure your communications are clear and precise are important.
Providing a range of resources to tackle issues specific to underrepresented students is key. For example, you could offer support directed at anxiety and stress arising from financial concerns, or from feelings of exclusion due to cultural differences. These kinds of targeted interventions are an important way of ensuring underrepresented students feel supported during their time at university.
Belonging and Inclusion
A focus on target groups and attempting to understand the specific kinds of exclusion they face is necessary to successfully widen participation. This requires not only listening to the student voice, but also engaging in active research.
Listening to your student feedback enables you to ask important questions about events and opportunities key to the student experience. For example: what does this scenario look and feel like for a student with no previous exposure? You might find that your fresher’s fair could be confusing or disorienting for first generation students.
It’s necessary to offer direct interventions in these scenarios. In the case of the fresher’s fair, this could include:
Organising coordinated group tours
Offering a brochure offering an introductory guide to the fair
Providing a wide range of events, not centred around activities that might be considered exclusionary, such as drinking
Designing an alternative, earlier welcome week aimed at these students
In each scenario, your strategy will depend on the target group you are trying to address and their unique experience. For example, if you are trying to increase participation among students of diverse cultural backgrounds, you might celebrate key cultural and historical events relating to their communities. There is no ‘one-size-fits-all' approach and interventions will need to be tailored based on evidence around inclusion.
Research into the experience of students who are likely to enter your institution with little to no understanding of what to expect is a helpful tool.
In 2022, Dr Laura Brassington of the University of Sussex conducted instructive research into the underrepresentation of Gypsy, Roma, Traveller, Showman and Boatman (GRTSB) communities in higher education. The research enabled the institution to better understand why these communities were underrepresented and devise a plan of action. It was also influential in the development of the GRTSB into Higher Education Pledge, which is being undertaken by institutions across the sector.
When considering how to support underrepresented students, then, it's vital to make sure your policies and interventions on belonging and inclusion respond directly to their needs.
Evidence-Based Interventions
The question of how to support underrepresented students is best answered by using robust evaluation and review processes to identify 'what works'. When attempting to stage interventions, you should evaluate past successes.
TASO’s evidence ratings provide a helpful structure for conducting this review. Their framework for rating interventions incorporates reflection on the strength of the evidence; the impact the intervention has on aspirations and attitudes; the impact it has on behaviour and outcomes; and the cost.
Considering these four ratings in tandem with one another allows you to understand better the success of your interventions and set realistic expectations for each project, so that resources can be allocated in the most effective way.
It’s worth keeping up to date with TASO’s work, as they have many ongoing research projects that are constructing an evidence base discerning what works when it comes to access and participation. They also offer several helpful resources to conducting this kind of evaluation.
Academic Support
Many underrepresented students find on entering higher education that they are at an academic disadvantage. This has a detrimental effect on student outcomes and perpetuates the trend of disadvantaged students underperforming compared to their peers.
Conducting surveys among underrepresented students provides crucial insight into their specific needs by degree subject. With this information, practitioners can work alongside academic staff to devise strategies responding to the needs of these learners and devising an action plan that outlines how to support underrepresented students in their academic life.
For example, disabled students may have concerns about attending lectures or teaching sessions due to accessibility issues. So, you might increase the provision of digital or hybrid teaching and learning methods. Or, if you are hoping to decrease the attainment gap for students from minority ethnic backgrounds, you could devise a mentoring programme that enables them to connect with academics or students of a similar background further along in their studies.
Employability and Progression
Graduate outcomes also form a constituent part of widening participation work. Research has shown that the most disadvantaged students are less likely to enter highly skilled jobs on graduating.
Is your careers advisory service tailored to accommodate the needs of students who might not know how to navigate the graduate labour market, or even know what to expect on graduating?
Something as simple as running targeted sessions or mentoring opportunities for these students could have beneficial implications for their employment outcomes.
Resources allowing, you can expand on this provision. The University of Exeter supplies extended support to disadvantaged students. This includes internship schemes directed at underrepresented groups across different sectors and bursaries for students from low-income backgrounds.
Here, curriculum delivery is also an important consideration. You should encourage careers services and academic staff to work together to ensure that practical skills and employability form part of the academic experience. That way, you can ensure your careers and employability offering meets the needs of underrepresented students.
A Sector-Wide Challenge
The guidance outlines how to support underrepresented students in a university setting. Covering admissions, student experience and graduate outcomes, we have considered the different challenges underrepresented groups face on their student journey, and how professionals can deliver interventions that respond to their specific needs.
As the challenge of widening participation is multifaceted, so too must be the solution. It’s crucial to review your institution’s specific limitations to equal participation, so that you can devise unique interventions. So, you may apply a selection of the approaches detailed in this blog. Alternatively, you might tailor them according to the resources you have available or the specific needs of your local community and student body.
