Survey: Help Shape our Understanding of “Place” and the Impact on Outreach Participation

Last week, we published a blog post exploring the role that place-based measures can play in understanding inequalities of opportunity. The blog shared some early findings from our analysis, including differences in outreach participation between Rural and Urban learners, and highlighted how Output Area Classification (OAC) data can help build a richer understanding of the communities we work with across the sector. We also shared how you can extract data from the system to do your own place-based analysis on your cohort.

We hope the findings have sparked interest and encouraged members to think about the factors influencing participation and progression within their own cohorts. While the data can help us identify patterns, your experience and local insight can provide valuable context and help us better understand what might be driving those differences.

We would love your views on:

• How useful OAC and other place-based measures are for your organisation.
• How you currently use, or could use, these measures in your outreach work.
• Why some groups, such as rural participants, may engage differently with outreach opportunities.
• How HEAT could better support place-based analysis, reporting and insight in the future.

Your feedback will help shape future research, guidance and service development, ensuring this work remains relevant and useful to members.