It’s been nearly three years since TASO was founded to tackle inequalities in higher education and 2022 was our busiest and most productive year yet. It always takes time to set up an organisation and to deliver large-scale research projects, even without the disruption of a global pandemic. I am very proud of the work of my colleagues in delivering in this context, and want to first highlight some of our achievements and success before turning to the challenges that face TASO, the higher education sector, and most importantly students, in 2023 and beyond.

In the past year, we’ve had a large number of online and in person events, with nearly 1500 people from over 100 organisations attending our events, and with around 120 now part of our sector network. Some highlights include our annual conference, attended by over 300 people and our six regional events which gave us an opportunity to engage with practitioners from across the country.

We also produced a number of evaluation resources; I’m particularly proud of our ‘small n’ guidance, our ethics guidance, and the various webinars and online question time events we’ve delivered. Thank you to my colleagues for their excellent work in developing this content and delivering our extensive events programme.

We’ve sought to be responsive and supportive of the sector, both in terms of their existing needs, and in terms of priorities from the Office for Students. Earlier this year we published a rapid evidence review on attainment-raising, and we’re currently working with a number of providers to further develop our theory of change resources in the context of revised Access and Participation Plans (APPs). Our ongoing survey validation project will also support higher education providers (HEPs) in evaluating their activities and reporting on them in their APPs.

This year was also a landmark for TASO and the sector in our publication of the first multi-institution Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) in the sector. We also published reports on mental health, employability, LGBTQ+ student wellbeing, the ethnicity degree awarding gap, as well as the evaluation guidance listed above. That’s a lot of pages! – though for each report we’ve also published summaries and offered recommendations for future research, policy and practice.

I want to thank all of our many partners without whom our work wouldn’t  be possible, and to thank them for their support. For our student mental health work, I particularly wanted to thank our consortium partners – AMOSSHE, Smarten, Student Minds, UUK and What Works Wellbeing – and look forward to learning from and working with them further in 2023.

Having outlined our successes and achievements, I’d also like to reflect on some challenges, across our research activities, for evaluation in the sector generally, and for students.

First, it’s not always been easy or straightforward to communicate the findings of our research. This is both because there is a technical language around quantitative research and because sometimes our findings are (and will continue to be) inconclusive or even negative. When you ask the question: does this work, sometimes the answer will be ‘umm, maybe’, and sometimes it will even be ‘definitely not’.

While we haven’t quite had any ‘definitely not’ findings, we’ve certainly had some ‘maybes’. It’s important that we don’t get disappointed or lose our commitment to evaluation and improving student lives, and there are in fact things we learn from ‘maybes’. For example, in our ethnicity degree awarding gap project, we found that curriculum reform interventions didn’t appear to have an impact on the degree awarding gap, but also that these interventions weren’t effectively implemented. On summer schools, our findings suggested that most participants were already highly likely to attend higher education, raising questions about whether or how they might better address young people who are currently less likely to attend.

This brings us to the most significant challenge: the cost of living crisis. While tuition fees are repaid only on employment, the costs of attending higher education for young people is now £924 per month, up 14% in a year. Maintenance loans  haven’t matched these sharp increases, meaning that more students will be turning to loans, jobs and parents, by far the three most common ways that students pay for their expenses.

It is hard to imagine this won’t have an impact on widening participation and on student inequalities. While the proportion of free school meal pupils attending higher education has never been higher (reaching nearly 30% in 2022), such pupils are unlikely to be among the two-thirds of students who rely on parents for financial support. There is also evidence that working during higher education is correlated with worse degree outcomes, leaving students with a choice between having enough money for food and housing, and doing well on their course.

Given this wider context, it becomes even more important that what we’re doing to address inequalities for students is effective. We will need to keep a close eye on the participation gap next year, but also monitor student surveys that capture measures of wellbeing, attainment, and labour market outcomes. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned this year it’s there is an appetite for working across the sector and commitment to addressing these challenges. To better support students in 2023 and beyond, we need to deepen that collaboration, so that we design and evaluate the policies and practices that ensure that all students can achieve success, regardless of their background.