Widening participation is important not only for reasons of social justice but as an essential element in efficient investment in human capital – in today’s world countries cannot afford to waste talent. More and better data are an important ingredient in designing policies to widen participation further and more effectively.
Nicholas Barr, Professor of Public Economics, LSE
Preface to Student Opportunity outcomes framework research programme: Data return project, 14 May 2015
The higher education sector plays a key role in helping to improve social mobility, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) aims to provide the opportunity of successful participation in higher education to everyone who can benefit from it. It allocates government funding to colleges and universities to support activities such as widening access, improving retention rates and enabling provision for disabled students. A key fund is the Student Opportunity allocation, which helps higher education institutions to improve access for disadvantaged and disabled students.
To help understand the relationship between HEFCE funding for widening participation and the resulting activities, outputs and outcomes, LSE Enterprise researchers worked with CFE Research and academics from the University of Birmingham to develop and pilot a data return to gather more detailed information about the impact of widening participation policy in general and the Student Opportunity allocation in particular. The report is one of five feeding into HEFCE’s plans to shape student opportunity and success for 2015-2020. In the context of government cuts, and the reduction in Student Opportunity funding announced in the 2015 Autumn Statement, this piece of research is strongly relevant for policy-making.
The project sampled 25 higher education providers, using a questionnaire and follow-up interviews to explore what data, monitoring and evaluation mechanisms were in place. The data was analysed alongside further interviews to understand the strengths, limitations and barriers to collecting data in this way.
Econometric analysis undertaken as part of a sister project also led by CFE Research reveals that the Student Opportunity allocation brings significant economic benefits. Every additional £1,000 of Student Opportunity funding yields individual economic benefits of between £7,700 and £9,000 and increased exchequer income of between £4,100 and £4,850. In addition, the existing research literature points out non-monetary benefits of widening participation, such as reducing inequalities in health outcomes.
However, the majority of institutions do not currently capture data in a format that allows for full analysis of impact. While randomised control trials may be the ‘gold standard’ of impact evaluation methods, they would be a significant burden for some institutions and ill-suited to explore the variety of indirect outcomes of widening participation policies. The researchers suggested that other data collection methods, such as the constitution and analysis of longitudinal cohort studies, would provide a better match between higher education data and employment data.
Conducting interviews with higher education management staff was a real learning experience. When you understand the range of positive results that are not measured in widening participation funding – and yet acknowledged – you realise there is much to be done and understood about how social inclusion works in higher education.
Tanguy Sene, project officer and researcher, LSE Enterprise
Read the report on the HEFCE website
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