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- Exciting Post-Entry Intervention Progress for Academic Year 2024-25
How to maximise HEAT for recording post-entry interventions, including the registering of post-entry Students to Activities, and the tracking of Ambassadors
We have received a hugely positive response from the membership regarding using the HEAT system and tools for planning, recording, and evaluating post-entry interventions to support Access and Participation Plans (APPs). As the proposed move into post-entry has been so warmly received, we’d like to share with you a summary of our plans to advance work in this area. Further detail on all the points below can be found on our Research Blog post, Using HEAT to record and evaluate Post-Entry Interventions.
Recording Post-Entry Work
Many parts of the HEAT system and tools can already be used to plan, record and evaluate post-entry work. You can see our visual assessment of the current system and tools in our recent blog post, but we will be working to develop and enhance the tools available over the next academic year.
Central to HEAT’s capacity to categorise and evaluate access activities in a consistent way has been the database Activity Typology. For post-entry, we will need to use new Activity Type categorisations to encompass the wide range of interventions relating to a higher education (HE)-enrolled student and their experiences. We are therefore recommending that members integrate TASO’s post-entry Mapping Outcomes and Activities Tool (MOAT) into the database and we have published a Recording Post-Entry Activities User Guide for members to support them in setting up Custom Data fields to do this.
Additionally, we launched a new Assessment of Performance (AoP) Dashboard for members in May 2024, and this will be updated in the autumn term of 2024/25. This is a PowerBI dashboard which allows members to visualise their Institution’s Office for Students (OfS) Portal data, assisting them in planning and monitoring for their APP. Each tab on the dashboard is a visualisation for the Access, Continuation, Completion and Success of entrants.
Registering Post-Entry Students to Activities
Once your post-entry Activities have been created, you can add your post-entry Students to the register. It is imperative that these students are shown the correct Privacy Notices to allow you to record their details and include them in both your own and HEAT’s aggregate research. To assist you we will shortly be publishing some case studies from HEAT members who have updated their Privacy Notices to encompass undergraduate students.
Tracking Ambassadors
Starting in 2025, we will be including Student Ambassador records with the correct permissions in the annual HESA Track to extend our research into the post-entry space and produce national-level research on Student Ambassador outcomes. Many members record information about students at their organisation who assist them in delivering outreach activities but currently there is no national quantitative research into the outcomes of these Student Ambassadors, a gap we hope to address.
In order to use your Ambassador data for this purpose, it is imperative that the individual has been served the HEAT Privacy Notice and the HESA Privacy Notice. The Ambassador ‘Permission to Track’ field will be used in the same way that we use the Student ‘Permission to Track field’. Any Ambassador who is set with ‘Permission to Track as Yes’ will be sent for HESA tracking and those set as ‘No’ will not.
Anyone with concerns about the accuracy of the information stored in this field, please contact Rachel Thompson who will assist you.
For more information about any of these topics, please read our Research Blog post: Using HEAT to record and evaluate Post-Entry Interventions.
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