Where to position pre-16 outreach in the university structure – and why
You may also like
Pre-16 access and outreach programmes support school pupils from under-represented backgrounds to find their way to higher education. They can include campus visits, workshops within schools and mentoring programmes. Initiatives like Uni Connect have been set up to coordinate these projects, and they’re monitored through access and participation plans.
- What is needed to run a successful outreach programme?
- How can universities get more school pupils enthusiastic about science?
- Doing outreach with children? Start with bricks, questions and storytelling
But where are pre-16 outreach teams located within a university structure? We believe this is crucial to success. It plays a critical role in how the work is perceived, both within the institution and beyond. Here, we’ll consider nine benefits of placing your pre-16 outreach team within a teaching, learning and library directorate.
Access and participation plan authorship
An access and participation plan outlines strategies to improve equality of opportunities, such as access, continuation and completion, attainment and progression, and employability. Education and student experience leaders will typically be key members of the authorship team, and positioning pre-16 outreach alongside learning, teaching and libraries will support integrated strategy development.
Evaluation output
Engagement with the national Higher Education Access Tracker showed the pre-16 outreach team’s commitment to monitoring and impact evaluation. Increasingly, universities are introducing centralised evaluation units to generate evidence for Teaching Excellence Framework or APP submissions (including access strategy evaluation). Evaluation teams are often located within a teaching and learning unit, so positioning pre-16 outreach practitioners in the same directorate ensures robust institutional evaluation outputs associated with access.
Information literacy teaching
As per SCONUL’s seven pillars of information literacy, librarians play a critical role in supporting students to develop advanced information skills: identification of information needs, search strategies, evaluation of content and referencing of sources. This is also important for pre-16 learners, as they progress through school. Co-locating pre-16 outreach alongside library staff creates opportunities for them to work in partnership with the team, and helps them both find ways to deliver the skills workshops potential students need.
Academic skills development
Learning developers are well placed to support pre-16s’ development of intermediary skills, such as developing writing, maths or exam techniques. Many learning development teams are based in either a teaching and learning unit or the library, so positioning pre-16 outreach teams in the same place allows for collaboration and co-delivery. Like pre-16 outreach practitioners, learning development teams will often be used to working to targets.
Digital system training
Learning technologists can offer digital platforms training to pre-16s; for example, providing a session exploring the ethical use of GenAI platforms and how they might be used to support effective studying.
Students as partners
Pre-16 outreach teams will often employ students. Within a wider learning, teaching and libraries directorate, there will likely be other student-as-partner initiatives, such as students as research partners in an evaluation team or as peer-to-peer learning supporters, assisting with transition to university and development of study skills. Hosting multiple students-as-partner schemes in the same directorate not only has the possibility for process efficiencies, but also has the potential to enable students to work across schemes, expanding their developmental opportunities.
Harness library spaces
A university library will be very different from both public libraries and those based within schools. Pre-16 outreach can showcase to future students what they can expect in terms of library learning spaces and resources. This would be particularly important as part of a wider aspiration-raising strategy. Basing a pre-16 outreach team within a library directorate makes it easier to organise tours of library buildings, or arrange opportunities to pre-16s to work in library spaces during campus visits.
Cross-disciplinary scholarship
In addition to facilitating cross-team collaboration, the location of pre-16 access teams can also promote cross-disciplinary scholarship outputs, such as presenting work at conferences or co-authoring journal articles and case studies. This may serve to expand the reach of pre-16 outreach activities in terms of engagement with new audiences who had not traditionally have engaged with output routes.
Amplifying professional networks
A pre-16 outreach team will have access to professional networks that will be new to many learning, teaching and library practitioners, such as the Forum for Access and Continuing Education or National Education Opportunities Network. Reciprocally, teaching, learning and library units will likely have memberships that would be new to a pre-16 outreach professional, such as the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education, Staff and Educational Development Association or Association for Learning Technology. Bringing together and sharing these resources can lead to ideas and innovations that would have otherwise gone unexplored.
Given that many universities are currently seeking to find efficiencies in processes and resourcing, how to best facilitate the work teams should be a priority. Positioning pre-16 outreach alongside learning, teaching and library colleagues, can amplify their reach. We encourage university leaders to create spaces for these teams to collaborate, as their output is often greater than the sum of their parts.
Steve Briggs is director of learning, teaching and libraries and Paula Page is pre-16 outreach manager, both at the University of Bedfordshire.
If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.
