EMWPREP had been working alongside HEAT and AHWM on a ‘Gaps Mapping’ exercise to help provide a national picture of WP activity delivery and possibly seek to identify any cold spots where additional support is required.
This project allowed the three organisations tracking outreach delivery to work collaboratively to collate data for the first time, and the resulting report should thus be seen as a first release, enabling the trackers to expose the challenges of mapping coverage and to agree upon a methodology for future exploration.
Currently the maps provide basic identification of those schools and colleges across England who were recorded as having engaged in at least one WP outreach activity on tracking systems during the academic years 2016/17 and 2017/18. They do not measure the intensity, type or duration of the activity or the engagement of individual participants within those schools. They also do not isolate those individual schools or colleges that have not had outreach.
With this in mind there is a desire by the tracking organisations to extend this work further and to examine coverage in detail so that we can identify hot and cold spots of outreach delivery.