As the Office for Students (OfS) finalises the new wave of Access and Participation Plans (APP) from volunteer ‘wave 1’ providers, it felt timely to reflect on the journey we’ve been through over the past 12 months.
In October 2022 the OfS launched its consultation on the new approach to Access and Participation Plans (APP). At the time we didn’t know there would be two waves of submission, but we did begin to change our language from ‘outcome gaps’ to ‘risks to equality of opportunity’ in our initial discussions about what the new APP might look like. When the new approach to Access and Participation was delivered in Regulatory Notice 1 (RN1) when it was published in April 2023, we were pleased to see that the language and direction were similar to what had been proposed by OfS during the consultations. RN1 sets out what we as institutions are required to do to meet the conditions of registration. There is an associated Regulatory Advice 6 (RA6) which, as the name suggests, is advice OfS is giving to institutions to help us best meet the criteria set in RN1.
To develop their plans, institutions are encouraged to consider risks to equality of opportunity in their own context. Through data analysis and consultation, we are then expected to identify and produce a summary of those risks and identify which student groups are likely to experience them at different stages of the lifecycle. Once the risks are identified, we then develop a set of intervention strategies. These are effectively action plans of activities which we believe will tackle each risk, based on both sector and local evidence, and a correlated set of outcomes which can be used to measure the success of each strategy. The final step is to produce a robust evaluation plan that will demonstrate that all of our actions and interventions have had an impact and genuinely mitigated our risks to equality of opportunity.
