Access and Participation: Building an evidence base of 'what works'

In this blog, Jo Astley and Dan West respond to the Office for Students’ (OfS) challenge to universities to prioritise generating, sharing and learning from evidence about what is working to make higher education more equitable, and explain how the University of Derby’s Policy and Evaluation Unit (PERU) is responding by establishing an innovative cross-institutional APP Evaluation Framework. The requirement for universities to produce Access and Participation Plans (APP) was introduced in 2018 as a condition of registration with the newly formed Office for Students (OfS). The raison d’etre of APPs is to secure greater fairness and improve social mobility for students described by the OfS as ‘disadvantaged and underrepresented’. The University of Derby’s APP demonstrates a strong commitment to eradicating awarding and graduate employability gaps, sets out the strategic measures (e.g. our new Attainment Policy) we will employ to remove barriers to student success, and presents the challenging targets we have set over 2020-25. Our reputation as a leading institution for social mobility is growing with three national award victories in 2020