Access and Participation Plans: Getting More Bang for Your Buck
Liz Moores and Lizzy Woodfield argue that robust evaluation is key to meeting access and participation plan targets.
What’s the problem?
In England, planned spending on access and participation in higher education is set to increase to £565 million by 2024-5, with around 60% of this spend on financial bursaries and scholarships. The majority of this spend is funded by Higher Education (HE) providers that charge the higher-level tuition fee of £9,250. Providers that charge this fee (the vast majority of them) must have their Access and Participation Plans approved by the Office for Students.
Despite this substantial financial commitment to widening participation activities, robust evidence showing ‘what works’ in facilitating disadvantaged learners to access and succeed in HE is lacking. Indeed, the Augar review expressed surprise that “there has been no overall assessment of the effectiveness of spend on different approaches to recruiting and supporting disadvantaged students”. Some policy makers question whether these funds are well spent, or whether they might be better spent elsewhere in the education ecosystem to provide greater impact and value for money for taxpayers.
With this in mind, there has been ever increasing emphasis on evaluation of activities carried out under the umbrella of widening participation, including discussion on how and by whom this should be done. At the same time, there has been decreasing emphasis on what universities input in terms of time and resources in favour of increased focus on impact.
Is robust impact evaluation enough?
Whilst robust evaluation might temporarily appease the Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students, knowing what does and does not work may not be enough to meet your targets. Evaluation is a key priority; understanding what doesn’t work is as valuable as what does. But, at the same time the sector is being asked to submit revised access and participation plans, and within these plans institutions will undoubtedly be expected to have stretching targets for improving the access, success and progression of disadvantaged groups. Indeed, the level of ambition expected may surpass estimates of what might realistically be achievable, based on available evidence.
This time, there is also a much more explicit expectation around increasing attainment of school pupils; evidence shows that attainment is strongly correlated with access to HE, so it is assumed that raising attainment will improve access. However, there are questions around the causal direction of this relationship and whether universities are best placed to raise school attainment. These issues matter, because the focus on impact rather than input implies that interventions must yield results; otherwise meeting targets will require more resource. More resource generally means more money, and the argument that this is something the sector says it doesn’t have right now does not need rehearsing, with tuition fees having been capped around £9,000 for more than a decade.
In line with other parts of most universities, outreach teams and other teams with access and participation targets are therefore typically being expected to do more with less (at least in real terms). Furthermore, whilst narratives around ‘closing gaps’ imply an incremental process where success is built on each year, the reality is that progress in this area is likely to be lost much more easily than it can be gained, so teams are already running to stand still, even before adding in additional societal challenges such as the cost-of-living crisis, or the changes to ‘opportunity costs’ of studying (e.g., if non-graduate employment opportunities improve). Although the Office for Students has recently provided additional resources to universities to help to mitigate some of these issues, there has so far been little acknowledgement that such factors may nevertheless impact providers’ performance.
Work smarter, not harder
As clichéd as it may sound, working smarter is the only practical solution to achieving stretching targets. Fortunately, working smarter can be facilitated by robust evaluation, focussing first on the most expensive activities and encompassing evaluation of what works, who for, in what context, which elements are important, and how many of them are necessary. Below, we discuss what we have learned so far from some of our own evaluations, including scholarships (thought to represent around 60% of spend), multi-intervention outreach and pedagogy.
Scholarships and retention
A recent analysis of our financial scholarships data showed that scholarships worked best in terms of student retention for students from households with incomes under £25,000. Since students from this financial background are also those most likely to withdraw from their studies, scholarships awarded to them are well spent in terms of improving retention. However, given that the size of award did not matter, it is less clear why scholarships work – if the money alone mattered a bigger impact would be expected with increasing award values – an interesting area for further research.
Well-targeted scholarships are also arguably less expensive to award than it might first seem, certainly if the costs of the alternative – potential attrition and loss of tuition fee income - are offset against the costs. In contrast, scholarships awarded on merit (e.g., based on achieving particular grades) rather than need might only be considered worthwhile in terms of the potential attraction of higher performing students rather than their retention, because evidence suggests that students with a lower UCAS tariff are more likely to withdraw (see here). However, there is little evidence in the sector that scholarships do work to attract students (and we haven’t investigated this) or that this type of scholarship is really about access and participation at all.
Outreach and access
Multi-intervention outreach programmes are common across the sector, tending to encompass a range of different activities potentially including summer schools, tutoring, campus visits and information, advice and guidance (IAG). Practitioners involved in the Aimhigher West Midlands consortium were confident that their UniConnect multi-interventions to improve access to HE in areas of low participation were effective but wanted to understand more about which elements worked best, and how many interventions were necessary or beneficial. A retrospective analysis of data showed that the programme was associated with an improved chance of achieving a place in HE, but that the type, extent of, and combinations of engagement all mattered. Critically, after students had engaged in more than five or six engagements, returns (in terms of HE entry) diminished, despite some students engaging in far more than this.
The UniConnect activities most strongly linked to UCAS acceptance were summer schools, campus visits and IAG, while tutoring offered no significant benefit – casting some doubt on the argument that raising attainment is the best way to improve access. Notwithstanding the caveats and limitations of this research, the findings can offer some important insight for practice. Summer schools and tutoring are both relatively expensive interventions to deliver, while campus visits and IAG are far cheaper. Overall, one of the best performing combinations of activities was master classes, campus visits and IAG; good to know if outreach needs to be delivered on a budget.
These findings might seem counterintuitive (which shows why evaluation is so important to challenge our assumptions!). They certainly seem not to align with a letter sent from a former Secretary of State for Education to the Office for Students, which suggests among other things that universities should offer summer schools and move away from ‘marketing activities’ – which we suspect could be read as interventions like campus visits and IAG sessions.
Pedagogical approach and student success
It is important to remember that access and participation activities are not only about specific or targeted interventions that require added resource but may instead be embedded in core activity. For example, the way in which teaching is conducted is likely to have a larger impact on reaching student success targets than anything else. Who you teach and how you teach both matter; changes to pedagogic practice may affect disadvantaged groups differentially.
Instead of adopting a deficit approach that focuses solely on targeting disadvantage with specific interventions, adopting a more inclusive approach to all provision is likely to yield significant benefits (and may not require a specific budget).
In conclusion
Significant sums are spent each year on access and participation activities with little clarity on what works. This matters at any time but is especially problematic when per-student funding is so dramatically squeezed by the tuition fee freeze and high inflation we are experiencing.
A comprehensive evaluation process can help you get more bang for your buck on specific interventions, as well as wider core activities, thereby helping to meet stretching targets. However, whilst the focus on evaluation is helping to guide us in the right direction, the impact of our interventions may sometimes be attenuated by societal changes and most likely need work each year just to maintain progress, let alone to close gaps. It would be prudent to focus most resource on targets where the institution is behind the sector, ensuring potential for improvement, but it will equally be important to maintain areas of existing high performance, particularly where they may differentiate a given institution from the sector.
Balancing these requirements in an increasingly challenging environment will be tricky for providers, and indeed for the Office for Students whose role it is to hold providers to account on progress which may not be linear.
About the authors
Liz Moores is Professor and Deputy Dean in the College of Health and Life Sciences at Aston University. She has research interests in the evaluation of education and has recently published on the topics of learning analytics, evaluation of access and participation, determinants of student attendance, benefits of the placement year and the determinants of student satisfaction.
Lizzy Woodfield is Aston University’s Head of Government Relations and Policy, where she works across a range of HE policy issues and on political engagement activities. Lizzy has held various roles in the higher education sector including with the Supporting Professionalism in Admissions programme, and as a member of the Russell Group’s policy team.
@Lizzyswoodfield
