Welcoming the establishment of the Evidence and Impact Exchange

We welcome the announcement today from the Office for Students (OfS) that King’s College London, Nottingham Trent University and the Behavioural Insights Team have been appointed to run the Evidence and Impact Exchange (EIX) – a ‘What Works Centre’ to promote access, success and progression in higher education (HE) for underrepresented groups of students.

HE should be a route open to all young people, irrespective of background. But we have a big and persistent social mobility problem in the UK: young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are half as likely to progress to HE as their peers.

To address this gap, universities submit an access and participation plan to the OfS detailing initiatives they will undertake to widen participation, and commit a proportion of their fee income to funding this vital activity. This amounts to around £860m across the sector, representing about 2.7% of total HE expenditure. It is vital that this money is spent well.

The purpose of the EIX is to be a national repository for evidence on the impact of approaches to access and participation in HE, and to ensure that the most effective approaches are recognised and shared. By collating existing research, identifying gaps in current evidence and generating its own research to fill those gaps, the EIX will play a critical role in disseminating accessible information and advice to decision makers across the HE sector.

As a charity that works to ensure that more young people from underrepresented groups access and succeed in HE, we rigorously measure our impact. We know that our programmes are getting thousands of young people into and through HE who would not otherwise have had this opportunity. We, and our colleagues in the sector, welcome the opportunity to contribute our evidence of impact to the EIX and to learn from what others in the sector are doing well.

Together with the OfS’s new proposals for regulating access and participation plans and their forthcoming evidence and evaluation strategy, the EIX will elevate what works in widening participation so that the best approaches are adopted, funded and scaled. This is a transformative moment for the sector and one that should be celebrated.

We hope the Augar panel and the government’s post-18 education funding review are watching these developments closely.

With so much focus on impact, now is not the time to turn our backs on the funding the sector needs to do this work well. We re-iterate our call for the government to make a public commitment to protecting this funding.

Nathan Sansom, CEO, The Access Project

Anand Shukla, CEO, Brightside

Julie Randles, CEO, Causeway Education

Andy Ratcliffe, CEO, Impetus-PEF

Rachel Carr, CEO, IntoUniversity

Johnny Rich, CEO, Push

John Craven, CEO, upReach

Rae Tooth, CEO, Villiers Park

How to make Information, Advice and Guidance more effective for students

Yesterday marked the end of the Office for Students’ consultation on the next steps for improving student Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG). Our Director of Research and Policy, Dr Michael Englard, explains why we think ‘supporting the supporters’ is so important.

The draft strategy shows that improving support for students is an urgent need. For those with an interest in what happens to students they leave school or college, the awkward IAG phrase is never far away. But, as the OfS makes clear, there needs to be a radical re-think of this catch-all term. At present, students are besieged by information but given little guidance in how to use it effectively.

The Office for Students' proposals make a strong case for taking a more personalised approach, which we at Causeway fully endorse. To make long-term systemic change, however, we need new ways of thinking about the underlying problem and innovative programmes to begin to address it.

The dominant discourse around Information, Advice and Guidance tends to position students as singular decision makers, diligently finding information on websites and then occasionally turning to their parents or teachers for advice. For anyone who works with students, the reality is quite different. Student choices are social as well as individual; partly emotional and partly rational. The process by which young people make life-altering decisions is rarely linear and often highly unstable. Crucially, students' decisions are powerfully shaped by the ongoing conversations they have with their key influencers - namely, their parents, friends and teachers. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds rely particularly on these "hot" networks of support rather than the "cold" information provided by websites and search engines.

In other words, if a new approach to Information, Advice and Guidance is to be effective then we need to start by ‘supporting the supporters’ and not to think about them as being peripheral or secondary to student decision-making.

One of the most crucial groups of influencers are, of course, teachers and careers advisers. Given the immense and shifting complexities of the ‘choice landscape’ and the everyday demands of school and college life, teachers need help and training in providing outstanding support to students. One example of this training is our Access Champions programme, which helps senior teachers to improve their school's systems for supporting students getting ready for life after schools or college.

Like the Office for Students, we would like to see long-term sustainable changes which will contribute to their ambitious target of closing the gap in access between the most and least advantaged students within a generation. If we are going to achieve this, we need to ensure that teachers are given the ongoing support and training they need to make a vital difference.