Using Student Data to Inform and Develop Access and Participation Interventions in Higher Education: Insights rom the University of Chester
In our ever data-driven world, we may know what our problems are, but what are we really going to do about them?
As Access and Participation Manager (Data and Reporting) at the University of Chester, it was my role to piece this puzzle together for our new Access and Participation Plan 2024-2028. We volunteered to be part of the Office for Students (OfS) pilot of submitting a plan early.
In this blog post, I am providing a few handy tips on leveraging student data to develop targeted interventions to address disparities and enhance student outcomes.
1. Identifying disparities in student outcomes
Our journey began exploring the Office for Students (OfS) access and participation data dashboard, alongside our own student data records. This allowed us to identify key challenges and disparities in student outcomes. In fact, we had five student groups experiencing a risk to equality of opportunity in accessing our institution, continuing and completing their studies, and being awarded the top grades.
This produced ten targets to tackle our issues with students from the most deprived areas (particularly if male), students who received free school meals, students who enter with non-A Level qualifications and students from the ethnic minority groups.
But what else did we know about this population?
2. Dig a little deeper, and deeper again
To gain deeper insights, we turned to other data sources to help us understand more about these students. For example, when looking at our access issue, we turned to University and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) data. We compared our offer rates for our male population from the most deprived areas to our male applicants from the least deprived areas. The results were eye-opening: we weren’t offering at the same rate due to grade discrepancies.
Additionally, a large proportion of our applicants hailed from local and regional schools, particularly in the Northwest and Cheshire. Delving further into local and regional Department for Education (DfE) data, our findings were striking: the schools with low maths and English attainment rates were similar ones our applicants came from.
When digging a little deeper, we also found students from the most deprived areas (particularly if male) and students from ethnic minority groups were also more likely to enter with a non-A Level qualification as their highest qualification on entry. Plus, as they came to our institution, they were also less likely to continue or complete their studies or be awarded the top grades whilst with us. This realisation was pivotal.
3. Connect the dots
Armed with this information, we knew that a) males from the most deprived local and regional areas weren’t being awarded the grades to enter higher education, b) students experience of deprivation was an underlying factor we had to address, and c) something about either our support and/or curriculum design was not connecting or representative of our non-A Level student population.
4. Building the interventions
So, where did we go from here? Our focus was to raise attainment in maths and English of our local and regional schools – this built our Intervention Strategy 1. By supporting our local and regional schools to develop their curriculum and teaching, we hope to empower students from deprived backgrounds. But this isn’t just about data – it’s about building strong relationships with these schools to benefit our community.
We also focused on providing financial capital (the know-how), along with financial support (the cash!), to empower our most deprived students. This built our Intervention Strategy 3 – providing students with a new money management service and funding opportunities that may not be readily available to them.
Our focus also shifted to provide tailored programmes to support non-A Level students (Intervention Strategy 4), and a whole curriculum reform (Intervention Strategy 5) currently being piloted with programmes with growing numbers of disadvantaged student groups where their outcomes are on the decline.
5. Don’t forget about the ‘soft’ stuff!
Finally, we must stay informed. Don’t forget to ask your students what they think or how they feel, along with researching what is going on in the sector. Not only did we approach our students for their thoughts and feelings, but we also hired them to co-design and co-create many of our new activities within our intervention strategies. This direct engagement brings disadvantaged students experience to the heart of the activity design. We are also members of a Northwest Widening Participation Research and Evaluation Group, sharing successful (or even unsuccessful!) interventions before published for wider digest.
I’ve only focused on a handful of areas here. But whatever your data tells you, just ensure that you dig deep enough to understand what lies beneath your problem areas. This will help tell your story and tailor your interventions to the needs of your own student population. Next step? Well, it’s to keep monitoring these student groups and evaluate the impact of these interventions to see if they have addressed your disparities and enhanced your student outcomes.
