Teacher interviews add a piece to the jigsaw of ‘what works’ in HE outreach

As part of a Government-funded programme Higher Horizons is charged with delivering impartial professional university outreach, but also with tracking the learners who participate in it. By 2024 we had data coming through from the years 2017-2021 that showed that those young people who engage with Higher Horizons activity are more likely to enter higher education than their non-engaging peers. Not only that, but a minimum of 5 hours of IAG and campus visits is what will get them over the line, more than any other combination of activity types  

Hard numbers grab the headlines, but here at Higher Horizons we do not rest on our laurels. We are always keen to triangulate with different kinds of evidence, quantitative and qualitative. So, we asked ourselves, knowing what is showing in the database, what is it like on the ground? What can teachers working at the coalface tell us that the numbers on a worksheet cannot? We asked Raniya, a placement student at Keele University, to interview some teachers from the Staffordshire area to see where they thought our impact lay and what activities they thought were most effective. 

This report, downloadable in pdf format below, tells us that teachers think we’re doing great work and, of course, we welcome the compliments. However, what is particularly welcome is that what they cite as particularly effective are IAG activities such as our mini programmes and our campus visits; the same type of activities that are coming through as effective in the tracking data.  

A teacher notes that our IAG content focuses on the ‘different pathways’ and shows that ‘university is an option for everyone, from any background’. We see this in our activity evaluation too – our Uni Facts, Informed Choices, and Next Steps mini programmes see attitudinal shifts in the area for which such activities have been designed, their pre-set Theory of Change outcomes, in each and every rollout. Our Year 9 programme has seen increases in learners wanting to go, expecting to go and intending to apply to university on all seven occasions between November 2024 and April 2025 in seven different schools. 

Our Student Life Day campus visits also see increases in HE inclination, expectation, and intention for each rollout between December and April of this academic year. Our cleaned and matched data from 17 Subject Taster Day campus visits sees the Theory of Change design outcome being met on all 17 occasions. No surprise then that one teacher interviewed says our campus visits have a ‘big impact’ while another describes how ‘very powerful’ they are. 

So, if we want learners who are the least likely to go to university to make that leap, we need to give them the information to empower and the experiences to inspire; the data says so, and so do the teachers. 

You can download the full report by clicking here.