Beyond the Barracks: Upcoming Project Developments

As outlined in our November Research Blog post outlining the project’s recent progress, HEAT is a partner the Office for Students Innovation Fund project Beyond the Barracks, which aims to develop innovative Post-16 outreach for students from Armed Forces families and plug gaps in data about this underrepresented group.

We have a progress update on the three key developments that HEAT is delivering, which will support and benefit the whole membership.

2. Hot and Cold Spot Mapping

In this dataset, we have combined Department for Education (DfE) information about the number and percentage of Service Children enrolled in schools and colleges, with information about the amount of outreach that has been delivered to those institutions in the last three complete academic years. If you are interested in delivering to Service Children, a group on the OfS Equality of Opportunity Risk Register, this dataset will help you to identify ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ spots in delivery.

The development of this dataset is progressing well and will be available to both Beyond the Barracks partners and all HEAT members upon release. We have some further work to do to finalise the end-product dataset and its functionality, but we envisage releasing it to the membership in Spring 2026.

If you would like to learn more about how to support us to strengthen understanding of Service Children and their engagement with outreach,  please see our latest announcement about recording Service Children on the HEAT system.

3. Contextualised Higher Education (HE) Entry Track for Service Children

Whilst we await our approved data from the DfE, we are actively engaging with Beyond the Barracks project partners to shape our research questions and ensure meaningful outputs once the data arrives.

This research is new territory for us, both in terms of its focus on a particular group as well as in the types of variables that we have requested from the DfE which might be helpful to us. Therefore, we will begin with a scoping and quantifying exercise and then work with an evaluation expert from the Service Children’s Progression Alliance (SciP Alliance) for this in-depth analysis.