Summer schools

What is it? Summer schools are a form of outreach comprising a range of activities organised during the summer holidays,  including workshops, taster sessions and social activities. Summer schools often take place on campus but can also be delivered online.

Evidence? There is little causal research on the efficacy of summer schools to widen participation. The existing studies show that students who attend a summer school express higher confidence and aspiration at the end than at the beginning, but evidence on progression to HE is limited.

Should HE providers use summer schools to widen participation? Currently there is insufficient evidence to say that summer schools are an effective tool to widen participation or support progression. It is plausible that summer schools attract participants who are already more likely to progress to HE than their peers. Given the time and resource-intensive nature of summer schools, there is a strong case for seeking more information on the efficacy versus other less intensive approaches. TASO is currently running a randomised controlled trial to understand how effective summer schools are.

What is this intervention?

Summer schools are outreach activities organised during the summer holidays. They are designed as catch-up programmes or to expose students to the HE experience. The aim is to equip individuals with knowledge of how to apply to HE and increase their confidence and interest in applying. Some summer schools also focus on encouraging take-up of specific subjects (i.e. STEM), or entry in a particular profession (i.e. medicine).

Summer school programmes vary greatly depending on their design features.

Programmes are generally run in-person, and may involve a residential element where students stay in student accommodation. Recently, online summer school programmes have been developed in response to the COVID-19 related lockdowns.

Regarding activities, programmes may offer participants the chance to meet academic staff and students, attend university-style lectures and subject tasters/masterclasses, take part in workshops and projects, and get a taste of the HE experience.

Summer school programmes also exist outside of the UK.

This page focuses on the overall impact of attending a summer school. For more advice on the constituent activities that might be part of a summer school programme, see our other pages on mentoring, counselling and role models and Information, Advice and Guidance.

What is the target group?

Most summer schools are targeted towards specific groups of students. The advice on this page is based on programmes specifically designed to address issues faced by students from disadvantaged and under-represented groups, including:

• Students from lower-socioeconomic status groups
• Care-leavers
• Carers
• Disabled students
• Black and minority ethnic (BAME) students

However, other summer schools are targeted toward other groups (e.g. international students, high achieving students).

In the context of COVID-19, the Department for Education has advocated for summer schools for secondary school pupils, as a way to make up for learning loss during the pandemic.

How effective is it?

There is little research on the efficacy of summer schools to widen participation.  Studies find that summer schools are positively correlated with an increase in confidence and attitudes towards HE (Robinson and Salvestrini, 2020). Only two studies find a positive correlation with application to and acceptance by HE providers (HEFCE, 2010 and Hoare & Man, 2011). Analysis conducted by TASO (2021), in collaboration with the Higher Education Access tracker, also found that participation in summer schools is associated with higher KS4 attainment and higher HE progression. Burgess, Horton and Moores (2021) have also found summer schools to be one of the widening participation activities most strongly linked to UCAS application success (defined as acceptance onto an HE course).

However, we must be careful about how we interpret the evidence mentioned above. Overall, the evidence can only tell us that there seems to be a positive association between summer schools and student outcomes – it cannot tell us definitively that the activities are having an impact (i.e. they cannot provide ‘causal evidence’).

This is because the students who take part in summer schools are likely to be systematically different from those who don’t – for example, even if the students look similar in terms of demography, they are likely to have different levels of motivation. It is possible that students participating in summer schools would be more likely to participate in HE compared to non-participants, even in absence of the summer school.

To address this issue and generate relevant causal evidence, TASO (2022) conducted a Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) of HE summer schools, delivered online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The interim survey findings from that trial suggest that those who apply to a university summer school are already interested in progressing to HE. However, it appears that summer schools may have a small positive effect on self-reported applications to HE, as well as the mechanisms hypothesised to mediate the relationship between attending a summer school and progression to HE  (i.e., self-efficacy relating to HE, compatibility of HE with social identity, and perception of practical barriers to HE). TASO is awaiting final outcome data for this trial and will report on the main findings in 2024. Additionally, we are currently running a similar trial on ‘in-person’ summer schools, whose interim findings will be coming out in spring/summer 2023.

What features seem to be important?

We do not have a strong enough evidence base to make claims about the most important features of summer schools.

What don’t we know

Currently there is no research which can give us ‘causal evidence’ on the impact of summer schools, either in the UK or elsewhere. This means that, although we can see that students who attend summer schools tend to have better outcomes in terms of aspirations/attitudes, we cannot say whether this is because summer schools are effective, or because only the most motivated and/or supported students tend to attend.

Given that these are large-scale, high-cost and resource-intensive interventions, we should expect summer schools to have a bigger impact than less intensive outreach approaches. More evidence on the relative scale of the impact of summer schools versus other approaches would help HE providers understand how best to structure their overall outreach offering.

Where does the evidence come from?

The existing evidence used to inform this page is predominantly from the UK and uses surveys to capture the attitudes/aspirations of students before and after taking part in summer schools. There have also been a very limited number of UK studies using ‘comparison’ groups of non-participants.

We have focused on evidence produced in the last 10 years and, in the case of UK-based evidence, since the student finance reforms were introduced in 2012. Older evidence has been included if it is exceptionally relevant.

The key references are given below.

Key References

Causal studies:

TASO (2022). Summer schools in the time of COVID-19, interim findings on the impact on widening participation. Available here.  

Other studies:

Burgess, A. P., Horton, M. S. & Moores, E. (2021). Optimising the impact of a multi-intervention outreach programme on progression to higher education: recommendations for future practice and research. Available here.

Church, E. (2019). 2018 Specific Evaluation UNiFY Residential, East Midlands Widening Participation, Research and Evaluation Partnership.

Ferguson, J. (2018). Outreach Summer Schools: Feedback Summary 2018, University of East Anglia.

Hatt, S., Baxter, A., & Tate, J. (2009). ‘It was definitely a turning point!’ A review of Aimhigher summer schools in the south west of England. Journal Of Further And Higher Education, 33(4), 333-346. Available here. 

Hayes C., Hudson-Jones, E., Church, E., Burr, E. (2018). Higher Horizons+Unify Residential 2017 Evaluation. East Midlands Widening Participation Research and Evaluation Partnership.

HEFCE. (2010). Aimhigher summer schools: Participants and progression to higher education. Higher Education Funding Council for England.

Hoare, T., & Mann, R. (2011). The impact of the Sutton Trust’s Summer Schools on subsequent higher education participation: a report to the Sutton Trust. Bristol: University of Bristol, Widening Participation Research Cluster. Available here.

Lei, J., Calley, S., Brosnan, M., Ashwin, C., & Russell, A. (2018). Evaluation of a Transition to University Programme for Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Available here.

Robinson, D. & Salvestrini, V. (2020). The impact of interventions for widening access to higher education: A review of the evidence. Available here.

TASO (2021). An investigation into the relationship between outreach participation and Key Stage 4 (KS4) attainment/HE progression. Available here. 

Younger, K. (2017). Nottingham Potential Summer School surveys 2017, School of Education, Durham University.