With over ten years’ experience in monitoring and evaluating the impact of outreach activities, we can support you to make best use of your data and measure participant outcomes.
Working as collaborative partnership of HEIs and OfS funded Uni Connect partnerships. we offer a targeting, monitoring and evaluation service for the outreach and recruitment initiatives delivered by our partners. Based, at our host institution, Loughborough University, the service provided by the partnership falls into four main categories
Targeting
For all partners we produce school profiles which help identify priority outreach schools based on a variety of agreed socio-economic and educational criteria of the student population. We also work with local authorities to identify individual target learners, using socio-economic and ‘potential’ data and provide this information to schools to assist them in the WP targeting process.
Monitoring
We monitor partner outreach programmes using a bespoke database, providing periodical reports containing analyses of the number, type and intensity of outreach activities. We also monitor the effectiveness of our targeting procedures via the collection of participant data. Here we report on the number of participants taking part in activities and disaggregate by a variety of factors such as deprivation indices, social class, ethnicity, disability and gender.
Evaluation
Each partner is entitled to one specific intervention evaluation report per year which can include the undertaking of focus groups with young people taking part in outreach activities and interviews with teaching professionals and other key stakeholders. It is also likely to include the design and analysis of bespoke participant questionnaires.
Tracking
By collecting detailed personal identifying information via our data collection forms we are able to link participants of outreach interventions to other datasets such as Key stage 2 attainment results, GCSE results and ultimately through HESA and/or UCAS into Higher Education. This allows us to ascertain if there are any particular activities or groups of activities which appear to have positive effects on the attainment and progression rates of learners- especially those under-represented in Higher Education. It also allows us to see there are any patterns as to where participants undertook activities and where they subsequently ended up.