Supporting Raising Attainment in Schools: Creating New Spaces to Think Differently
In this piece Dr Susila Davis (Research Advisor), Dr Samina Khan (Director of Undergraduate Recruitment & Admissions) and Alison Matthews (Deputy Director of Undergraduate Admissions) of the University of Oxford share some of their learning around the potential ‘supporting’ role of universities in school-university collaborative spaces focused on raising attainment. Their insights are drawn from research into a programme co-founded between the University of Oxford and The Challenge Academy Trust (TCAT) in the North West.
In March this year, the Office for Students announced that their regulatory notice on attainment-raising work will now include the word ‘support’: “to better reflect that higher education providers’ activities will be a contribution to that of schools to raise pre-16 attainment” [authors’ own italics]. This emerged after the sector’s response to an OfS consultation on a new approach to ‘regulating equality of opportunity in English HE’.
The addition of the word ‘support’ is a welcome recognition of what many universities and schools have been saying for a while. It is neither viable for universities to be held wholly accountable for learner outcomes in schools and colleges, nor would it be expected by school leaders and teachers. The teacher-student relationship is vastly different to, and more involved than, an often shorter-term interaction between a student and a university researcher or outreach practitioner. As significant as some relationships could potentially be in the latter category, it is unrealistic to expect that they would supersede the former. As the OfS agrees: “[w]e consider that providers can have a significant role in raising pre-16 attainment, but we also recognise that they cannot be held solely responsible for it.”
We are of the view that universities can and where resources are available, should support schools in their attainment-raising work but cannot play the main role in the endeavour. Universities are uniquely placed as external partners to act as enablers of ‘third spaces’ or alternative environments where teaching and learning can look a bit different to the day-to-day classroom, and learners and teachers have opportunities to consider themselves and their capabilities beyond conventional norms. Research findings from a partnership that we co-founded with academies in North West England, Oxplore-RAIS (raising attainment in schools), have illuminated three key ways that HE institutions may be able to support schools with raising attainment.
Oxplore-RAIS is a collaboration with The Challenge Academy Trust (TCAT) in Warrington, Cheshire, that supports raising attainment using an ‘enrichment for all’ approach from Year 5 at primary to Year 10 at secondary across the trust. Enrichment sessions for learners are anchored by Oxplore – Oxford’s digital resource that aims to challenge learners aged 11-18 years with ideas and debates that go beyond the curriculum. TCAT is a trust made up of four primary and five secondary schools, and one sixth form college, with varying levels of disadvantage. The programme incorporates strategies to support raising attainment for bigger, mixed prior-attainment groups and to address disadvantage that begins earlier in young people’s educational journeys. TCAT senior leaders and teachers have been collaborating closely with Oxford staff and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) since the programme’s launch in 2019 to co-build and continuously develop Oxplore-RAIS. Here we outline what we have learned so far on some of the ‘supporting roles’ that universities might play in attainment-raising collaborations with schools.
Initiating and building a ‘third space’ to consider attainment differently
Findings from our research with teachers in Oxplore-RAIS highlight the relevance of the role of universities as ‘catalysts’ in the attainment-raising space. By engaging with schools in a sustained programme that is recognised across the TCAT trust and taking time to co-build the ethos or ‘hearts and minds’ of those involved in the partnership, a new ‘space’ has emerged.
Teacher interviews describe how the programme’s enrichment delivery sessions enable greater challenging of existing thinking and practice, a realignment of teacher and student expectations, and an improvement in learners’ socio-emotional outcomes such as confidence, motivation, self-efficacy and academic self-concept. This ‘third space’, also referenced by the OfS, gives practitioners in our research what they term ‘permission’ to work more creatively and outside of everyday norms. An example of this is how teachers and ECRs go beyond the national curriculum during delivery sessions but still cover key ideas for conceptual understanding.
Teachers and leaders also indicate that co-designing and co-delivering these sessions helps them to reflect on and translate their own aspirations and expectations into their teaching and learning practice and relationships with their learners in positive ways. Seeing learners engage with learning somewhat differently to how they would normally interact in the day-to-day classroom seems to enable a shift in teachers’ thinking to allow for a more inclusive approach to teaching and learning.
Enabling collaborative opportunities between educational researchers and practitioners
Oxplore-RAIS was co-founded by staff in TCAT and the Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach department at the University of Oxford. One of the founders is an educational researcher and first co-author of this article. Senior leadership at Oxford (the second and third co-authors) saw the need to appoint an ‘educational researcher in-residence’ on the programme to encourage the use of educational research evidence to underpin the partnership. Several TCAT senior leaders identified that the evidence-informed approach to the programme is one of its strengths. The approach is ‘boosted’ by a tailored application of evidence that combines the objectives of the programme with TCAT’s context, school improvement aims and knowledge from teachers and leaders, essentially forming a type of ‘practice-informed evidence’.
Education departments in universities are well-placed to support attainment-raising in schools via the judicious deployment of educational research evidence, in close partnership with teaching practitioners. Academics in education may also be good sources of teacher continuous professional development and learning. Better supporting teachers, who are key intermediaries in efforts to improve access and widen participation to HE, helps to encourage a sense of continuity of a programme’s ethos and strategies after a collaboration ends.
Owing to the range of educational stages involved in the programme (primary, secondary, post-16 and HE), an additional opportunity was found in Oxplore-RAIS in our exploration of research evidence from different fields. Often, research in higher education and widening participation is detached from research with and about schools. This programme has opened up more space and time to help unite the HE research base with that of educational effectiveness and improvement. This has illuminated ways to consider not only attainment, but the predictors of attainment, and the important role of teachers, teacher-student relationships, as well as learners’ affective outcomes.
Building greater regional and national capacity through early career researchers
One key element of the partnership is how TCAT teachers collaborate with Oxford’s ECRs. Teachers are paired with researchers ECRs in different subjects (STEM and MFL) to co-design delivery sessions, essentially translating ECRs’ research studies into curriculum- and classroom-relevant session content. We feel this is where the third space really comes into its own, by transporting teachers and learners to an alternative environment that elucidates key concepts in different subjects in sometimes more practical ways such as experiments, group projects and discussions with scientists and linguists.
ECRs are ideally placed to ‘model’ academic and learning-focused behaviours and attitudes to learners that may come across more readily translatable to everyday classroom experiences – sometimes just by virtue of engaging with learners or offering a new perspective. These opportunities can be further enhanced if ECRs delivering sessions have similar backgrounds to learners from more disadvantaged contexts. They can share their lived experiences of travelling through the educational pipeline, the ‘possible selves’ that they imagined on the way and their considerations of further and higher study.
Ideally, even more ECRs with a variety of expertise and backgrounds would be involved to work more systematically with greater numbers of teachers and schools in the UK. Our intention is to co-build a system of ‘national and local empowerment’ where ECRs in universities across the country are able to support schools and work with teachers and learners in their local areas, and ultimately help to build capacity for an enrichment-for-all approach nationwide. We invite more universities to consider this approach for their attainment-raising interventions.
In this piece, we have suggested three elements of Oxplore-RAIS that universities may look to build on and develop further in their attainment-raising partnerships. We are still learning from our collaboration, and there is much that can be improved as we certainly do not have all the answers. However, we hope that these ideas might spark universities and schools to consider raising attainment partnerships slightly differently, and maybe help to maximise the strengths of universities in their supporting roles in learners’ educational journeys.
About the authors
Dr Susila Davis is a social scientist specialising in research methodology and currently Director of Research and Learning at the Centre for Knowledge Equity. Previously, she was Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Global Higher Education in UCL Institute of Education, and Research and Evaluation Coordinator in Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach at Oxford University. An Economic and Social Research Council scholar during her doctorate study at Oxford, Susie has over ten years’ experience in educational research, specifically educational improvement and effectiveness, equity, widening participation into higher education and youth transitions.
Dr Samina Khan has been Director for Undergraduate Admissions and Outreach at the University of Oxford since 2014, and is responsible for strategy, policy and advocacy for admissions and student access across the University. During Samina’s leadership at Oxford the representation of state school students at Oxford has increased, and currently about seven out of every 10 offers have been made to state schools and furthermore in 2022 more than one quarter of UK undergraduates identified as Black and Minority Ethnic. She has pioneered targeted programmes to attract more UK students from under-represented ethnic heritage and socio-economically underprivileged backgrounds and has responsibility for international student recruitment too.
Alison Matthews is Deputy Director of Undergraduate Admissions at the University of Oxford, she has a background in education and assessment and is an Honorary Norham Fellow at the Department of Education at Oxford. She was Director of Research, Development and Evidence at QCDA and has worked as a consultant with a range of organisations including UCAS, SQA and City & Guilds. Her research interests include equity and access in education and assessment, evaluation of curriculum and qualification change, and comparability of qualifications.
