John Blake’s new year speech to the English sector on increasing equality of opportunity through collaboration had some interesting messages in it.
He was building on his big messages from late last term – which stressed the need to consider the breadth of student mental health issues, student co-creation over initiatives, and the need to contribute to tackling the biggest risks to students – not just the easiest ones to address.
Now the Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students (OfS) has announced that he’d added some additional groups of students who may be at risk of not experiencing equality of opportunity – service children, young carers, prisoners, commuter students, parents, and Jewish students.
He also stressed a major change in OfS’ regulatory expectations that was relevant to third sector colleagues – what he calls “the presumption to partnership”.
To help, later this year OfS is going to seek bids for a share of a £2 million fund – providing grants to seed new practices and test new ideas aimed at supporting the equality of opportunity agenda that Blake has laid out.
