New higher education evaluation library: Advancing sector-wide learning and impact through shared evaluation

Last week the Office for Students (OfS) announced that TASO will be hosting a new ‘higher education evaluation library’ (HEEL). We are excited about developing this resource, which will help us deliver on our central aim: improving evaluation in the sector. It’s also a timely project, with the OfS emphasising the need to publish evaluation plans and reports as part of their access and participation plan (APP) regulatory framework.

One of the challenges of improving evaluation in the sector is understanding exactly what is happening on the ground across the wide range of higher education providers. HEEL will allow us to gather evaluations from across the sector in one place, and enable providers to learn from one another.

However, gathering these evaluations – currently published in many separate places  is a complex and time-consuming job. Our intention is to first develop the library infrastructure, so that submissions are easy to access and search. We will then have an open submission period – rather than setting a fixed amount of time in advance – to allow us to gather as many submissions as possible from providers. In coming months we will outline our inclusion criteria (what we expect providers to send to the library), likely including a requirement that any publications are accompanied by a theory of change (a requirement that aligns with existing APP guidance). This will mean that the library will include a wide range of methodologies, prominently including what the sector knows as Type 1 evaluations.

Once the first ‘gathering’ phase of the library is complete, TASO will develop an approach on how we categorise it. We will likely be categorising submissions by evaluation methodology, as well as by intervention type. One finding we are already anticipating is that there is a fair amount of duplication in the sector – though delivering a particular programme will likely vary provider to provider, based on the size or nature of the university or college and the learners they are seeking to reach.

Once we’ve gathered and categorised evaluations in the library, we will analyse what we’ve found. Our hope is that we will be able to create summaries or ‘digests’ outlining what the sector is doing, by intervention type and evaluation methodology. Exact timescales will depend on how many submissions we receive, but our aspiration is to do so at least twice a year.

Finally, we intend to use the findings from HEEL to inform our evaluation support. For example, we might find that 10–20 providers are working on mentoring, and have each developed a theory of change for their particular programme. TASO could then consider developing a more generic theory of change template for mentoring, perhaps in consultation with some of the existing providers delivering mentoring.

We know that the sector is committed to improving evaluation and to joint learning. At the same time, we know that many feel constrained by time, resources, knowledge or skills to deliver more or better evaluations. By pooling our existing knowledge and practice together in HEEL, we can better work together to ensure our activities to address inequalities in higher education are effective. Over the three plus years since TASO was established, we’ve produced a large number of practical resources and our toolkit. We’ve also learnt a great deal from all those working to address inequalities in higher education, and I’m impressed by the support for and culture of peer learning in access, progression and success. The library will be a further tool that all of you can access, and to learn what your peers are doing to ensure their evaluations are as robust as possible. The library won’t be built overnight, and we need to ensure that it has the right foundations to be useful for sector learning.

Publishing evaluations is clearly a priority for all providers in the access and participation plans they submit to the OfS. It is also the best, if not the only, way to improve our evaluations, to ensure that we are effective in tackling inequalities in higher education, and that we can enable every student to thrive and succeed in higher education.