Monitoring and evaluation arrangements. Monitoring of the targets and milestones identified within this Access Agreement is addressed on an on-going basis through the use of the University’s management information system, which is updated as new data becomes available (overnight in some cases) and presents key performance data for use by the University Board, Academic Board and its sub-committees, the Senior Leadership Team, Colleges, Schools and Services. In addition, as part of our new strategy, we are enhancing our ability to monitor impacts at the more detailed level, through arrangements to track the progress of students involved in specific initiatives or in receipt of financial support and overall monitoring of any differentials in levels of access, retention, attainment and progression by equality characteristics and other factors known to impact on these aspects of the student lifecycle. As we have referenced throughout this agreement, we regularly collect feedback on the impact of individual initiatives and programmes of activity and take soundings from students on the appropriateness and effectiveness of the support arrangements we have established. We are in the process of purchasing the HEAT database, which will provide longitudinal tracking and enable us to assess the effectiveness and impact of our access and student success initiatives, and we are hoping for this to be in place by September 2016. We monitor annually the progression of students from HE courses offered through partner organisations to ‘top-up’ courses at UCLan and progression of students from the foundation year programmes and are working to identify any particular groups which may require intervention and support. The University is exploring its institutional data in more detail to identify different aspects of under-representation within the access, success and progression remits to inform our approaches moving forward. As referenced earlier in the document, we also draw on findings from national research and evaluation to ensure we are able to maximise the impact of our activities and resources and support our students effectively in fulfilling their full potential. Our Access Agreements are monitored through reports to the university’s Student Experience Committee, which is a sub-committee of Academic Board and is chaired by the Pro Vice-Chancellor (Student Experience). The Students’ Union is represented on this Committee. Overall responsibility for the Access Agreement resides with our Pro Vice-Chancellor, who...
Monitoring and evaluation arrangements. 7.1 Annually, the University reports to the Office for Fair Access, OFFA, in its Annual Monitoring Report. This includes all expenditure from additional fee income on financial support for lower income students and other under- represented groups and reports progress against objectives and milestones. We look forward to the development of the national evaluation framework to inform our evaluation of access and student success activities effectively.
Monitoring and evaluation arrangements. The Access Agreement, Widening Participation Strategy and WPSA will be monitored through the strategic plan and annual operating statement and through annual reports to the Senior Management Team. Regular reports will also be made to the University College’s Learning Enhancement subcommittee which has a particular responsibility for learning enhancement and student achievement. The Senior Management Team and the University College Council annually review HESA student data, including the performance tables for widening participation. The Fees and Financial Support Group and the department of Student Support will also play a key role in monitoring activities. Evaluation will take place across the Widening Participation themes and stages of the student lifecycle outlined in the Access Agreement and detailed in the WP Strategy. The University College has recently developed a WP database which is linked to its Unit-E student records system. The rationale behind this decision is recognition of the need to evaluate effectively the impact of future WP activities. This will enable analysis of evaluation questionnaires, including quantitative and qualitative data, attitudinal and shifts in perception and longitudinal studies. These methodologies will enable the University College to track future WP students throughout their student lifecycle and will be monitored regularly by the WP team. The University College will evaluate the impact of WP activity through a number of means and WP activity will be reviewed regularly alongside the new WP strategy and Action Plan. The University College will assess the outcome of outreach work with young people in schools and colleges contrasting both target schools and those with whom there is a special relationship, e.g. where the University College sponsors an Academy School. It will be included in the First Impressions survey, the post induction student survey, to ascertain the nature and extent of previous contact with the UC through outreach activity. Further work will look at adding an additional data field to application and enrolment forms to capture such information. The intention will be to also monitor the performance of students recruited as a result of WP activities. Progression and retention statistics will be monitored as will impact of support measures through the annual programme monitoring and business planning processes. Differing methodologies will be used to assess the impact of interventions, such as questionn...
Monitoring and evaluation arrangements. 8.1 The University will continue its policy of making admissions statistics publicly available, through its web-site. Those statistics include data on the number of applications and acceptances by school type, region, gender, ethnicity and socio-economic classification.
Monitoring and evaluation arrangements. The Pro Director (Learning and Teaching) is the senior manager with ultimate responsibility for access and widening participation. SOAS’ commitment to access is further supported by faculties and departments through the planning, implementation and monitoring of various measures, particularly in relation to retention, progression and collaboration. Performance in widening participation and access are monitored by the Academic Development Committee chaired by the Pro-Director (Learning and Teaching) and are also considered by the External Relations Committee (chaired by the Registrar and Secretary) and the Student Experience Committee (chaired by the Xxxx (Languages and Cultures) and, at the highest level, discussed at Academic Board and Governing Body. All areas of SOAS have a responsibility to support widening participation and fair access. The core SOAS Widening Participation Team is based in the Academic Development Directorate (ADD). The team works extensively with the Student Recruitment and Admissions Office, Faculty Offices (Languages and Culture, Law and Social Sciences, and Arts and Humanities), Registry and Student Services and the Students’ Union on issues of access, admissions’ criteria, student support and retention. The implementation of this access agreement will be supported by all these areas. The body responsible for the delivery of the Access Agreement is the OFFA Steering Group comprised of; Pro- Director (Learning and Teaching), Registrar and Secretary, Xxxx of Law and Social Sciences, Director of Finance and Planning, Director of Academic Development and Head of Widening Participation. This group reports to the Director of SOAS. An action plan will be developed, in collaboration with the Students Union, to support the implementation of the Access Agreement and this will be monitored by the Steering Group. The Director of Academic Development will be responsible for delivering the action plan reporting to the Pro Director (Learning and Teaching). A Working Group comprises of key staff working on areas relating to access, student success and finance will provide advice and feedback on the progress of implementation.
Monitoring and evaluation arrangements. The University recognises the importance of monitoring and evaluation to inform the development of its access and student success and has developed an evaluation strategy which allows it to demonstrate the impact of its WP activity. Local level evaluation undertaken by each area of activity is fed into a central evaluation template. This allows an institutional overview of areas of success and areas for future development to ensure spend is based on evidence of impact. Evaluation is an iterative process and teams involved in WP activity meet regularly to discuss the progress of activities and share good practice. Use is made of existing management information available from national datasets (such as UK Performance Indicators of Higher Education) and internally available data, as well as the monitoring data collected by all activities about its participants. Qualitative and quantitative data collected by means of, for example, questionnaires are also used to assess the effectiveness of the delivery of specific activities to inform future development, as well as to gauge the short term influence of interventions on individuals’ aspirations toward HE and attainment. Such methods have been designed so that they are comparable across different activities and age groups where possible. The University will also look at ways of monitoring cohorts of individuals involved in WP activity from pre-application outreach work throughout the student lifecycle. This will also aid in its understanding of the impact of interventions. Challenges in accessing data about wider progression to HE remain and difficulties in determining data on, for example, attainment pre-university will need to be addressed. The University will make use of the new Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT) to measure the progress of participants in Access initiatives as and when this becomes available. However in the meantime, the University will do all it can to endeavour to collect this information and is open to working collaboratively where potential networks of opportunity exist. Evaluation of the effect of financial support on student retention and success will also continue to be carried out. As well as analysis of withdrawal and attainment data, this will also take the form of questionnaires to those in receipt of awards, feedback from our first year experience survey and the CFE research evaluating the National Scholarship programme. The University has a Student Financial Support Working gr...
Monitoring and evaluation arrangements. 3.1 Progression, Achievement and Employability are monitored routinely in relation to the KPIs identified at University level. The strategic objectives set at Faculty and subject level are monitored annually as part of the planning cycle. The performance of the academic portfolio is monitored in parallel with the performance of students. Internal statistics are benchmarked with Unistats data at course level. Outreach activities are informed by analysis of applicant and student data by feeder institution and borough, drawing on data provided through the DfE, HESA, the Student Loans Company, the GLA, and London Boroughs. From 2015/16 greater focus will be given to recording the impact of Access and Student Success initiatives.
Monitoring and evaluation arrangements. 5.1 The measures set out in this Agreement and the progress against targets and milestones will be monitored by the Student Experience Committee on behalf of Academic Board. It will use the targets set out in paragraph 4 above and will be assessed using the four levels of evaluation set out in HEFCE Circular Letter 24/10: basic monitoring; assessment of targeting; measurement of outcomes; and assessment of value for money.
Monitoring and evaluation arrangements. This section details how the measures set out in the Agreement (including collaborative work) are monitored and evaluated. Statistical measures will be monitored on an annual basis by the Planning Office as part of the analysis of the HESA return and HESA Performance Indicators. Collaborative targets will be monitored via the Higher Education Access Tracker (HEAT). Canterbury Xxxxxx Church University is a founding member of the collaborative Higher Education Access Tracker Service (HEAT) that assists members in the targeting, monitoring and evaluation of both their individual and their collaborative Fair Access activities. It allows member universities to demonstrate outreach participation in relation to success at key transition point, collectively explore best practice in combining qualitative and quantitative research on outreach and in the future, perhaps, facilitate the development of collaborative targets. Membership of the HEAT service assists Canterbury Xxxxxx Church University in fully understanding patterns of participation in outreach and the effectiveness of different types and combinations of outreach, something which is made possible by the collaborative nature of the service. Individual members use the HEAT database to record outreach activity and can see where individuals have engaged in activities with more than one HEAT university. Collectively this allows the central HEAT service to analyse the timing and combinations of activities that show most impact on enrolment in HE. It can take some time for data about young participants in outreach to mature to the point of understanding their patterns of enrolment in HE as well as their retention and success rates. In the meantime, the HEAT service has developed a model of matching a number of different administrative datasets to the HEAT database which will afford the University a better understanding of the relationship between outreach and key educational outcomes at both pre and post 16, before any enrolment takes place. The collective size and diversity of the database will mean this relationship can be explored against multiple participant characteristics, contributing to the University and the sector's understanding of outcomes for different underrepresented groups and recognising that widening participation students are not a homogenous group. Where HEAT data has matured it allows the University to understand the relationship between outreach participation and HE access, success (retenti...
Monitoring and evaluation arrangements. 80. The University is employing the services of its School of Applied Social Sciences and its Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM) to undertake evaluation and monitoring. The Centre, which works with schools nationally, has access to very large quantities of relevant background data against which to evaluate the University’s access measures. The University is also collaborating in a research project to evaluate the retention benefits of bursaries.
