Mind the (ethnicity degree awarding) gap: supporting academic departments to proactively evaluate and enhance their practice

Collaborative working

When we saw the TASO invitation to tender – Addressing the ethnicity degree awarding gap – we brought together a small working group to think about whether to apply and which intervention was the best one to propose. 

This was an important step in the journey, as it brought colleagues together and facilitated collaborative working in this space. We discussed lots of specific interventions, but kept coming back to the same key point: we need to focus on a cultural change within the institution to address the ethnicity degree awarding gap, through a whole provider approach that makes this part of our core business, and embeds this work within academic departments.

Everyone’s business

We wanted to get to what we saw as the nub of the issue: making the ethnicity degree awarding gap everyone’s business by supporting academic departments to consider their own data and to design and evaluate their own interventions in partnership with students. 

Through these internal discussions, we identified an opportunity to pull together different strands of work that were currently sitting in different teams, some specific to Access and Participation Plans (APPs) and some part of wider university quality assurance processes. 

The tender we submitted to TASO sought to capture a whole institutional approach that would knit these strands into a clear package of interventions to address the ethnicity degree awarding gap. 

Through the process of putting together the tender, we began to identify and discuss ways to bring the relevant central teams together with a shared purpose and an increased understanding of each other’s roles and contributions and the ways these intersected with academic departments. 

We didn’t know if we would be successful with the tender as we knew it would be a popular opportunity, but in any case, we were pleased to have done this thinking across teams and were keen to take this work forward internally. It was great and an added bonus when we heard we were successful!

Evaluation support

The support from TASO’s appointed evaluators (Staffordshire University and Advance HE) has been hugely beneficial in helping us to think through our Theory of Change for this initiative; the inputs and interdependencies, how to stage the work and measure short and medium term outcomes, and why this approach could help to address ethnicity degree awarding gaps at York. 

It hasn’t just helped us develop our thinking around this project, it has also provided a facilitated approach to bringing different teams together and increased understanding of each other’s roles and responsibilities and how we can achieve more together. 

Theory of Change

One of the outcomes from this work is a greater awareness of the benefits of Theory of Change as a tool that can be used across different types of projects and interventions. On several occasions since starting this work, we have heard colleagues say ‘what we need is a Theory of Change’ and not just for APP projects!

If we can develop an Enhanced Theory of Change for a multi-layered initiative to develop a whole provider approach to addressing ethnicity degree awarding gaps, we can do it for anything!

Authors

University of York:

• Professor Jill Webb, Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning and Students (Social Sciences)
• Jan Ball-Smith, Head of Apprenticeships and Inclusive Education
• Jess Penn, Deputy Head of Inclusive Education