Posted 5 January 2019

Practical and achievable solutions to evidence the impact of widening participation at higher education providers were discussed at GHWY’s second Good Practice Programme event.

Evaluation for All: Developing Evidence of Widening Participation, which was held at the University of Leeds on 14 December 2018, drew on a range of expertise and provided ideas that were applicable to institutions of all sizes and resource levels.

The event sought to engage delegates in new insights, ideas and approaches that they could take back to their everyday roles. It also aimed to provide enhanced understanding of the tool that the Office for Students (OfS) will use to assess institutions’ evaluation.

Participants attended three seminars:

• Presentation on the OfS Framework for Evaluating Outreach (University of Exeter), which gave a brief introduction to a new tool that will benchmark evaluation practices and help to identify where efforts might be focused in the future.
• Build your evaluation toolkit and an introduction to Realist Evaluation (University of Leeds and GHWY / NCOP), which introduced delegates to innovative yet simple evaluation methods and tools, spanning quantitative and qualitative approaches.
• Opportunities for collaborative evaluation (GHWY), which gave attendees the chance to consider and formulate collaborative solutions to common evaluation challenges and requirements.

The event was well received by delegates, with one person commenting, “I came away from the event understanding more about what our team needs to do to meet our evaluation requirements.”

The Good Practice Programme, which was launched in April 2018, is aimed exclusively at GHWY’s HE provider partners. Keep checking our website for details of the next event.