The Office for Students’ revised approach to regulating equality of opportunity will require higher education providers to focus more on contextual considerations when developing access and participation plans (APPs). And there’s one area in particular that could benefit from this new focus – the ethnicity degree awarding gap.
This is the gap between students from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds who are less likely to graduate from their studies with a 2:1 or first class honours degree than their White peers. As previously outlined on Wonkhe, the gap is starkest for Black students, and progress on addressing it has so far been slow.
A new report commissioned by TASO and conducted by the University of Staffordshire shows that despite years of effort to tackle the ethnicity degree awarding gap across the higher education sector, there has been little innovation and limited evaluation of the impact of programmes to address it.
The purpose of this report was not to uncover “what works” but rather to map the landscape of existing practice. It analyses current approaches across the sector – as outlined in APPs – and provides a unique look at what providers are doing, how they are currently evaluating this work and how we at TASO can support the sector in doing so better.
