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- HEAT Success on Two Bids to the Office for Students Innovation Fund
We are delighted to announce that HEAT has been successful in two collaborative applications for funding from the Office for Students Equality in Higher Education Innovation Fund
Our first collaborative bid, led by HEAT, will work with UCL to explore the development of a new Outreach Metric in determining the contribution of outreach programmes to higher education progression across the sector. Our second collaborative bid, led by York St John University, aims to improve the evidence base on what works’ when working with Service Children. More information on both projects can be found below.
Members will have the opportunity to feed into both projects through our working groups and we will keep you updated on progress. If you have a particular interest in either project, please do contact us at HEAT Support.
Pioneering a new Outreach Metric – with the Sector for the Sector
Following on from the National Outreach Coverage Project in 2021, the HEAT membership was keen to ensure that we extend this work, with a focus on exploring the use of our aggregate tracking data to design a measure of providers’ broader contribution to reducing access gaps across the sector. This new measure will aim to complement current measures used in Access monitoring, which focus on providers’ own intake of students. This funding allows us to carry out this extension. Please see our Research Blog project summary for more information on the project activities and outputs.
The project will have the expertise of UCL researchers, Professor Claire Crawford and Dr Paul Martin at Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO). We will also work with the other trackers, EMWPREP and Aimhigher West Midlands to produce a combined dataset that the researchers will use to test the methodology of the new metric.
HEAT’s involvement in this project will ensure that it is collaborative, led by the Sector through a project steering group, and that an already existing dataset (that the membership has worked hard to collect) is used to its full potential, increasing our knowledge and helping us to evaluate our work.
Improving the evidence base on ‘what works’ when working with Service Children
In this project, led by York St John University, HEAT is a project partner along with the Uni Connect partnership Inspiring Choices, Askham Bryan College, York College and the Service Children Progression Alliance (SCiP). All partners will work together to build knowledge and evidence of ‘what works’ when working with Service Children.
The project will:
- Review established interventions
- Co-create an innovative programme that more directly addresses the diverse needs of Service Children
- increase collaboration between further education colleges and higher education providers to better understand the transition and progression of Service Children into post-18 settings
As part of the project, HEAT will receive funds to develop a new Automated Comparator Group Tool that will be integrated within the HEAT database. This tool will be developed as part of this project to improve evaluation for Service Children but, ultimately, will be available for the whole membership to use to evaluate all activities delivered to all student groups.
This development was voted as the top development request by members who attended HEAT’s Extraordinary Research Group in June 2024 and, as a result, was an item for which we have been actively pursuing funding opportunities.
HEAT’s initial proposal for the Automated Comparator Group Tool is to develop functionality which would allow members to identify a group of non-participating or low engaging students from their dataset (potential non-participant group) and match them to the participant group they are evaluating. Matching would be based on covariates and customizable depending on the data available. If the user chose to accept the suggested match, the ‘paired’ non-participating student would then be registered to the selected Activity as a comparison group and therefore coded correctly for track reporting.
In addition to our project partners, we plan to work with the Research Group and System Review Panel to ensure this tool is useful to members.
We are excited to be collaborating on these two projects, and are looking forward to the valuable insights these will offer the sector as a whole. If you have any questions, please get in touch with HEAT Support.
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