Widening participation resources

Commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), the Higher Education Academy (HEA) recently published four toolkits which, according to Alan Langlands (HEFCE Chief Executive), offer “practical guidance for those working in higher education outreach and widening participation”. Available through the HEA’s website at Higher education outreach to widen participation: toolkits for practitioners, these toolkits are web-based and cover four themes:

• partnership building
• targeting activities
• delivering programmes
• undertaking evaluation

As the HEA says, these “are a distillation of the learning, methods and resources developed by Aimhigher and the Lifelong Learning Network programmes. They support the effective strategy, management and delivery of outreach work to encourage progression to higher education for under-represented groups. The toolkits recontextualise the learning from these programmes to fit the current higher education environment.”

In addition to these toolkits, the HEA also hosts a series of other resources through the Widening Access, Student Retention and Success (WASRS) National Programmes Archive, including six WASRS literature synteses.