Beyond the Barracks: Innovative approaches to supporting Armed Forces Students

Beyond the Barracks is a pioneering initiative aimed at improving access to higher education for students from armed forces families. The project aims to build knowledge and evidence of what works when supporting this group in further and higher education settings.

Led by York St John University in collaboration with Inspiring Choices, Askham Bryan College, York College, the Service Children’s Progression Alliance (SCiP Alliance), and HEAT, the project is one of only eleven selected by the Office for Students (OfS) for its innovation in promoting equality of opportunity.

Whilst our partners on this project will be co-designing and implementing new and innovative outreach interventions with service children in post-16 education, HEAT will play a central role in generating robust evidence about ‘what works’ for service children.

Project Initiatives

HEAT’s input will be in three parts; we will be developing:

1. An Automated Comparator Group Tool on the HEAT system

2. Hot and Cold spot mapping

Building on our Coverage and Institution Profile data, we will be building a resource to enable interrogation of data on the delivery of activities to schools and colleges in relation to the size of an institution’s service children cohort. This will allow Beyond the Barracks partners and the wider HEAT membership to identify institutions with large cohorts of service children and low outreach engagement, thereby helping to target outreach activity.

3. Service Children Educational Transitions research

We will be utilising HEAT’s existing annual Contextualised Higher Education Entry dataset, which interrogates Key Stage 4, Key Stage 5, and higher education entry data matched to HEAT student cohorts, to investigate similarities and differences in attainment and transition for service children versus non-service children. The outcomes of this research will be made available to the sector and wider HEAT membership.

Project Timelines

Officially, this project runs from July 2025 to July 2027 in line with the Office for Students funded bid. We look forward to consulting the HEAT membership as the project progresses, particularly with regard to the functionality of the Automated Comparator Group Tool.  Below is the planned timeline: