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JAPP: Abstracts

Volume 5, Number 1, Autumn 2007

From opportunity to OFFA: discretionary bursaries and their impact
Neil Harrison, Arthur Baxter and Sue Hatt, University of the West of England, Bristol

This article presents a summary of findings from a five-year longitudinal study of a cohort of full-time students from low-income backgrounds holding the national Excellence Challenge Opportunity Bursaries and similar institutional bursaries at a post-1992 university. This group was found to have higher levels of retention and success, exhibiting particularly positive attitudes towards their studies and their institution. These findings are then placed in the wider context of government policy on widening participation and student financial support between 1997 and 2006, considering whether any lessons learned are relevant to the post-2006 system of university-specific bursaries monitored by the Office for Fair Access (OFFA).

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Wider Access Premium students at the University of Glasgow: Why do they need support?
Lynn Walker, University of Glasgow

This article examines the first-year progress of students who attract a Wider Access Premium granted to support and retain students from disadvantaged areas. Currently the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) confers the Premium to universities based on the numbers of students who come from certain home postcodes where participation rates in higher education are less than half the national average. The debate on the Premium and how it is conferred centres on its apparent limited impact as measured by discontinuation rates and on a lack of awareness among practitioners of the focus and experience of under-represented students in higher education. Another issue in the debate concerns the methods of allocation of the Premium. Among the options for change to the present methods of allocation is eradication of the Premium altogether.

This would remove earmarked funding for additional support for such students. It is, therefore, important for universities to know who their widening participation students are, why they need additional support, and how it should be channelled.
We focused on a subset of undergraduate students who entered the University of Glasgow from the most disadvantaged postcodes in the west of Scotland. We combined qualitative and quantitative methods to address the questions of who they are and why they need support. We discovered that these students are more disadvantaged than the average student and that, despite being equally qualified, they progress at poorer rates in first-year studies. The most important interactive variable that we found was that they lacked self-confidence in comparison with other students. They worried about being able to cope with work levels, making friends and teaching styles.
We concluded that such students require additional support as early as possible to help them fit in and to assist the process of integration. Proactive interventions should help their progress.

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Partnership and progression to higher learning in the South Wales valleys
Duncan Holtom with Jeremy Gass and Rhodri Bowen

The Progression through Partnership project brings together the Workers’ Educational Association South Wales (WEA) with the Universities of Glamorgan and Newport, in order to enable progression from and through community-based further and higher education (FE and HE) provision into campus-based HE provision. This article reviews findings from an external evaluation of the project, to assess its impact upon learners, their communities and the partner institutions themselves. The article uses the concepts of human, social and cultural capital to assess individual and community-level effects and considers changes in institutional practice, in order to assess the impact upon partner organisations. The evidence suggests positive impacts upon each, and the article considers the reasons for this, including the relationships staff have forged with learners, the way the project has helped embed HE in communities where it was previously both culturally and physically distant, and the strength of partnerships between community-, FE- and HE-based provision.

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Using institutional data to monitor higher education student recruitment
Steve May and Michael Hill

The influences of government policy and the mission of Kingston University have led to the university’s strategic commitment to recruit, support and retain students from traditionally under-represented groups and to its putting in place a wide range of initiatives related to widening participation and retention. To support this work the university has developed RAFYR (recruitment, admissions and first-year retention) data sets which present institutional data in a way designed to assist staff across the university to identify areas and practices where changes or interventions have the greatest likelihood of success, and to monitor and evaluate their impact. This article explores the underlying policy issues around widening participation and reports the development and use of the RAFYR data sets as an institutional case study. It finds that a prime obstacle to addressing the barriers to the admission and retention of non-traditional students through the more effective use of data lies in the extent to which staff are supported in their engagement with the issues.

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Differential policy and discourses on lifelong learning in the NHS
Francis Knox, Coventry University

The relationship between the policy utterances of government and the ways in which those policies are implemented are mediated by the organisational imperatives and political structures within which they occur. This article comprises an examination of the ways in which the policies of the UK 1997 New Labour government in relation to lifelong learning within the UK National Health Service (NHS) have been mediated by NHS constituent organisations, and in consequence how the new National Health Service University (NHSU) ‘failed to thrive’.

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