As someone involved in delivering the Uni Connect programme, I had found myself waiting with bated breath for the final report of an independent evaluation of the programme to be published.
This feeling will have been shared by many others in the sector, especially those running the 29 Uni Connect partnerships across England. For our organisations, the report and its recommendations are of existential importance.
There is much to welcome in its findings, including balanced assessments of where Uni Connect achieves real impact and where, with reforms, it could achieve even more. The report stops short of making a definitive recommendation as to what a national collaborative higher education outreach programme should be, and do, in the future, but that was always going to be the case given decisions on the future of Uni Connect rest ultimately with the Office for Students (OfS) and, by extension, with the Department for Education.
We now await OfS’ promised response to Public First’s evaluation. After such a prolonged period of flux for Uni Connect – phase three of the programme was of course subject to a consultation, too – a clear signal from the regulator and from government about the longer-term future of the programme is urgently needed. The OfS would also do well to heed the advice of my London Uni Connect colleague Antony Moss, who has written for the Higher Education Policy Institute about how to put collaboration at the heart of any future settlement for the programme.
