EMWPREP originated from the government announcement that Aimhigher funding was to cease in July 2011. At this point, a collective decision between six existing HEI stakeholders in the East Midlands was made to fund a continuation of the monitoring and evaluation services offered at the time by Aimhigher in the East Midlands.
With Loughborough University acting as Data Controller, the five other East Midlands universities agreed to co-fund a new partnership.
The partnership allowed institutions to collaborate in pooling resources to secure a range of services enabling them to devise a systematic way of monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of their programme of outreach interventions by tailoring the offering to meet their specific needs.
Now with over ten years’ experience in monitoring and evaluating the impact of outreach activities we have grown organically, from the initial commitment to the service from one year until 20212 we now have have commitment to this collaboration until July 2025.
The partnership growth has seen us expand into other regions and is made up of both HEI and Uni Connect partners. Working as a partnership minimises duplication of effort and sharing of costs, it also gives us a collective voice we can influence policy in the sector.
The partnership aims to deliver a range of monitoring and evaluation services to suit the differing needs of the partner institutions. We utilise data to effectively target learners for interventions, capture and store learner data on a bespoke database, and deploy appropriate methods to monitor and evaluate members’ outreach work, with the aim of tracking learners through their educational lifecycle. All partners have access to the variety of services available and they can tailor the specific service to meet their own institutional needs year on year.