Most higher education providers in England are now in the process of preparing their new Access and Participation Plan (APP) for the Office for Students (OfS), following a trial which involved 40 institutions – known as the “first wave”.
The University of Reading was part of this pilot group, working under renewed and elevated expectations toward evaluation and the generation of robust data to evidence “what works”.
OfS’ Standards of Evidence provide guidance on the collection of high-quality evidence to inform our understanding of how our programmes are working or not.
As part of our recent APP submission, we as the evaluation team were responsible for working with intervention and activity leads in our institution to clarify the intermediate and long-term outcomes of our programmes, especially how these would be measured.
