Sutton Trust Online was launched deep in the lockdown of summer of 2020, at a time when school teaching had been severely disrupted and much access and outreach work was forced online. Created with the aim of providing students with the information, advice, guidance and support that they need to access a leading university or apprenticeship through an 18-month journey, we have since onboarded four cohorts of students to the platform, developing our content and technological offering as well as improving our ability to measure the platform’s engagement and impact. As we pass over the three-year mark since the first lockdown, we reflect on our journey measuring online impact and engagement.
In the late 2010s it was becoming apparent that in-person capacity constraints were limiting the students we could reach, meaning we were having to turn away an increasingly high number of highly eligible students from our university access programmes. It became clear to us that we needed to provide a source of support for these students, even if we couldn’t create space for them on an in-person programme. From this, we decided to create a digital platform that would distil elements of our Summer Schools programme through an online, light-touch intervention- Sutton Trust Online.
We originally planned to launch STO in 2021, but when COVID-19 hit the rapid development of the pandemic significantly shifted the needs of our students and our programmes. We reacted by expediting the platform’s development and welcomed our first cohort of students in summer 2020, building STO in less than four months! This was not the STO that had been originally envisioned- we were not simply offering light-touch support, but helping over 20 universities and hundreds of employers to deliver our existing suite of university, careers and apprenticeship programmes.
