Context

This research project is still in development and therefore information will be updated as and when the scope is finalised. Details below will provide an indication of the direction. If you would like to support or have any information that you feel would be useful in this development phase, please contact the APP Impact team.

Many Widening Access initiatives, at post-16 level, are designed to provide students with increased higher education awareness and knowledge, which supports their readiness for university. With the increased focus from the Office for Students on ‘Attainment Raising’ activities – interventions which will improve a student’s outcomes at key stage 4 (Level 2, eg GCSE) or key stage 5 (Level 3 eg A Level/IB/BTEC) - many outreach programmes will be morphed towards demonstrating an increase in attainment for students.

This project will explore the impact on students’ attainment of outreach programmes that are not specifically designed or marketed as improving students’ outcomes. The programmes focus on intermediate outcomes such as academic self-efficacy, cognitive strategies, sense of belonging and university expectations and knowledge. The project will therefore identify if these intermediate outcomes affect a student’s outcomes at key stage 5 and identify if a specific attainment raising intervention is required to improve a student’s attainment.

This project aims to review HEAT data and university data to review if those who attend Bath’s Widening Access programmes have similar/better attainment at Level 3 and their achievements on-course at end of Year 1.

Evaluation Questions

Current suggested evaluation questions are: - Is there correlation between attending a Widening Access Post-16 programme and Level 3 attainment? - Are students who complete a University of Bath Outreach programme more likely to achieve higher Level 3 grades than those that apply but don’t attend? - Are students who complete a University of Bath Outreach programme more likely to achieve better Year 1 on-course attainment?

Methodology

• Review of attendance and non-attendance of Widening Access activities over the past 2-3 years via Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT).
• Non-random comparison groups to review KS5 attainment
• Longitudinal tracking of Widening Access intervention attendees as they enter the University of Bath to review their prior attainment and their Year 1 attainment.
  

Type of evaluation evidence

Using the OfS standards of evidence this project will produce Type 2 (empirical evidence)

Published report

At the end of the project timeline, a report will be published on this webpage.