Blog6 January 2026
What do we know about whole-provider approaches?
In the UK, inequalities persist between who accesses, succeeds in, and successfully progresses from higher education. A concern at many institutions is that the initiatives run to address these inequalities become piecemeal and disconnected. Institutions are therefore increasingly recognising the importance of coordinating and aligning their equality-focused activities. In England, this has been picked up in access and participation guidance, with the Office for Students requiring providers to describe their ‘whole-provider approach’ to addressing risks to equality of opportunity in higher education.
The broad aim of the whole-provider approach is to embed inclusion, reduce inequality across the student lifecycle, transform culture and improve outcomes for all student groups. The rationale is that aligning institutional policies and engaging stakeholders in the goal of addressing equality gaps is more effective than delivering individual interventions. Underpinning this, the whole-provider approach is supported by senior leadership, institutional policies and processes, staff capacity, and data and evidence.
Intuitively, the rationale for adopting a whole-provider approach makes sense. The more an institution aligns and coordinates its equality and inclusion work across the student lifecycle and across its functions, the more effectively students are supported and equality of outcomes improved. However, in practice, the conceptualisation and implementation of whole-provider approaches looks very different across institutions. Further, this rationale hasn’t been fully tested – what’s the evidence that a whole-provider approach is more effective, and how can we find out? In a recent project, we addressed these two challenges by using a theory of change framework to capture the whole-provider approaches of six universities.
Understanding the sum and its parts
A theory of change is a framework used to map out the key aims, activities, and intended outcomes of an activity. While it is frequently used for smaller-scale interventions, it is a useful tool for thinking through change at any level, including higher-level strategies and approaches. Working collaboratively with six universities, we mapped out the key activities and intended impact of their whole-provider approaches and, most importantly, how they expected the activities to lead to the impact.
When using theory of change to its full potential, it provides a valuable framework for thinking through what we want to achieve and how we will get there. For articulating whole-provider approaches, using a theory of change helped the universities we worked with to better define the activities included (and not included) in their approach, and the inputs they would need to make these happen. These activities included things like improving governance structures, aligning student-facing initiatives across the student lifecycle, and engaging students through co-creation opportunities.
The more challenging next step was to consider what outcomes the whole-provider approach contributes to and how these would be achieved. The number of overlapping and circular arrows that appeared on our theory of change diagrams soon made it clear that the different components of the whole-provider approach interact to achieve the overall aim. This led us to summarise the final theories of change in a narrative format, to more clearly explain these pathways.
Theory of change also proved to be a powerful tool for stakeholder engagement. At many providers, a desired outcome of their whole-provider approach was to shift the remit for improving equality and inclusion from sitting mainly with widening participation and equality, diversity, and inclusion teams to the wider university community. Including academic and professional services staff and student representatives in a theory of change workshop served as a first step for raising awareness of the whole-provider approach, and ensured multiple voices were included in its conceptualisation.
That being said, theory of change is not a perfect tool. As we quickly discovered, a whole-provider approach is a pretty complex idea to fit into one theory of change. Inevitably parts of it will be simplified, not all relationships will be fully captured, and the influence of an institution’s context on the whole-provider approach means the theory of change is sometimes shifting as fast as it can be captured. But if the aim is to understand how the puzzle pieces of an institution come together to improve equality of opportunity, we need to see the big picture before we can assemble the parts.
How do we know if it’s working?
When assembling a puzzle, it’s easy enough to evaluate whether it’s worked: have you ended up with a picture at the end that looks like the one on the box? Establishing the success of a whole-provider approach is much more complicated. The theorised benefit of the whole-provider approach is that aligning and coordinating activities across the provider is a more powerful way to support inclusion than delivering standalone interventions. Evaluating its impact should therefore go beyond evaluating individual components of the whole-provider approach, and consider how these components interact to have a collective impact.
In practice, this is likely to require a range of evaluation methods and assessment of evidence carried out across an institution over time, and the necessary time, expertise and resources to do so. A more realistic starting point may therefore be to evaluate one component of the whole-provider approach first – while still considering its interaction with the context.
A work in progress
Developing and implementing an effective whole-provider approach is no small feat, and a work in progress across the sector. That being said, it is work worth continuing. Institutions do (and can do) much more than deliver targeted interventions to support inclusion and equality of opportunity. Using a theory of change framework can help institutions to map out and strengthen the work that goes on across a provider to reduce equality gaps and promote inclusion, and to understand (and eventually evaluate) how the whole approach is greater than the sum of its parts.