Project | Piloting methods to develop better evidence on student support

About the project

We partnered with two independent evaluators and four higher education providers (HEPs) to build the evidence base for what works to reduce equality gaps for disabled students in HE and improve employment and employability outcomes for students from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds.

The overarching aim of the project was to learn more about the approaches which could be used to develop these sorts of evidence by piloting evaluation methods which are less commonly used in the sector. By cascading the lessons learnt from these pilots to a wider audience, TASO hopes to stimulate more and better evaluation of similar interventions which can help us build a stronger evidence base on ‘what works’.

The aim was to build Type 2 evidence for interventions that support these outcomes, and scope out the feasibility of Type 3 evaluation.

The following HEPs were chosen to work with independent evaluator SQW:

• University of Brighton
• University of Exeter

The University of Cambridge acted as independent evaluator for:

• London School of Economics
• University of Central Lancashire

With the support of SQW and the University of Cambridge, the providers developed an evaluation plan and theory of change for the activity being evaluated and explored how Type 3 evaluation methods might be used to assess intervention impact in the longer term.

Background

Our report on What works to reduce equality gaps for disabled students suggests there is a need for more and better evaluation of interventions to address inequalities for disabled students in higher education. It also identified a number of evaluation challenges specific to this group.

Similarly, our report on What works to reduce equality gaps in employment and employability also found the evidence base is relatively weak in terms of that which can help us understand impact, and particularly when it comes to students from disadvantaged or underrepresented backgrounds.

To build the evidence base, we put out a call for higher education providers to submit case studies of interventions they are delivering in these areas which showed evidence of promise and would benefit from robust evaluation.

Further resources