Dr Emma Thompson, Head of Enhancement, University of Southampton

1 March 2024

Mind the (ethnicity degree awarding) gap: The importance of cross-team collaboration

The Office for Students has emphasised the importance of a whole-provider strategic approach to delivering and robustly evaluating widening access and participation initiatives.

Dr Emma Thompson, Head of Enhancement at the University of Southampton, discusses some of the challenges and the university’s approach to cross-team working in tackling the ethnicity degree awarding gap, working alongside TASO as part of its Theory of Change project.

Universities are often seen as large, labyrinthine organisational structures, where excellent practice may be hidden in pockets or silos across the institution. This can make a whole-provider approach to tackling complex and multifaceted problems – like those addressed through an access and participation plan (APP) – especially challenging.

The University of Southampton is no exception in facing this challenge, nor is it unique in its commitment to tackling the ethnicity degree awarding gap through a multi-faceted strategic approach, so we were thrilled to see the invitation to tender for TASO’s Theory of Change project. For us it presented the opportunity to learn from TASO’s independent evaluators about how we could draw together diverse expertise and differential approaches to tackling an institution-wide, complex problem, ensuring that we took a consistent and systematic approach to its evaluation.

At Southampton we benefit from having a distinctively structured Widening Participation and Social Mobility (WPSM) team. Like a lot of universities, we previously had staff for whom the APP was a core responsibility in several different areas across the institution. In early 2020, we pulled together most of these roles into one central team. Our colleagues who are responsible for student success now work alongside those who are committed to our access or partnership initiatives, to truly exemplify a lifecycle approach to widening access and participation.

This allows us to unite otherwise disparate efforts towards the same goal. Our response to TASO’s invitation to tender showcased this, describing three workstreams aligned to each element of our trifecta approach to the ethnicity degree awarding gap at Southampton: Curriculum, Culture and Community.

The three Cs is a framework which we had developed through student consultation and sector research (as written about by my colleague, Chido Chipato in her earlier TASO blog article). Our selection of initiatives for the bid reflected our multifaceted approach to supporting Black students.

Curriculum

Our Dissertation Writing Retreats features as the curriculum focus. We deliver a two-day fully funded residential programme to help students make excellent progress in writing their dissertations and promote successful degree outcomes.

Culture

Our bursary evaluation project focuses on the work of the financial support team and its efforts to review a financial culture that may be negatively impacting the ethnicity degree awarding gap. The aim is to increase uptake of financial support to reduce the impact of the growing cost of living and enable greater engagement in activities that could also improve degree outcomes.

Community

Finally, our Awarding Gap Project Student Panel is a paid initiative for UK domiciled Black undergraduate students, whereby students oversee the curation of student-focused community interventions, supported by the student inclusion team. The Student Panel devise student events, collaborate with stakeholders and produce resources like the Black Fresher’s guide for new and returning students.

Working with TASO

Our structure facilitates what we can collectively achieve, but we still face challenges in how to collectively evaluate; when you’re concentrating on your particular piece of the puzzle, having a common, comprehensive evaluation of all the different elements can sometimes become lost. This is where working with TASO has been so beneficial.

Collaborating in the workshops was easy because of our existing strong working relationships, across the institution and the individual projects, but TASO’s appointed evaluators took us further still. They facilitated an environment that allowed us to understand how to evaluate the sum as well as the parts of our endeavours, through the completion of a Core and Enhanced Theory of Change.

Having the opportunity to work with experts to unpick the mechanisms for change in a very detailed way but then coming back together to discuss how this contributed to the common aim was enriching and kept us focused.

We know that the ethnicity degree awarding gap is an institution-wide issue and the focus of the work we did with TASO was just the tip of the iceberg in the context of making the change we need to deliver. Nevertheless, the experience of working with TASO’s independent evaluators has not only reinforced our approach to collaborative working but also provided us with a toolkit to make further progress. We intend to use the lessons and methods used in the workshops to implement more effective cross-institutional evaluation, working in a similar way with our faculties and governance structures to leverage large-scale change and significantly reduce the ethnicity degree awarding gap.