Earlier this month we held our third annual conference in Birmingham. It was a jam packed, two day programme filled with panel discussions, exclusive first looks at our latest evaluations and practical workshops to help attendees design effective evaluations and develop Theories of Change.

It was wonderful to see the sector come together in this space – to learn more about ‘how to evaluate’ but also to network and learn from one another.

But what were our key takeaways from the event?

Firstly, building a community of practice is really important

We know there is a growing community of evaluators, practitioners, managers and more who are committed to improving equality in higher education (HE) and to sharing advice and best practice along the way. We see this through the popularity of our evaluation webinars, our growing Sector Network and through our work with HE providers and other project partners.

We saw it at the conference too –  we saw the sector come together, in-person, to talk to us, and each other, about their work and the issues (and successes!) that they’re experiencing right now. These conversations are super valuable to us as an organisation but also because we know how important they are to making progress in this space. We hope our delegates found value in them too.

Practical, hands-on support is important too

After our annual conference last year we received feedback from delegates that they wanted more hands-on, practical support from us so this year, that’s exactly what we did. On the second day of the conference we ran workshops to equip delegates with the skills to design effective evaluations and develop Theories of Change, supporting them to respond to new regulations and guidelines.

We thought these sessions worked well – we got to give the sector that hands-on support but it also gave us the opportunity to speak to them directly about their work and the issues they’re facing (something we don’t really get to do through our online events). We really feel like we learnt a lot from these sessions!

In true TASO fashion, we conducted a pre and post survey of conference delegates. We were pleased that in the post-event survey 92% of delegates told us that they felt they had the skills and knowledge to undertake good evaluation at their institution.

More of these sessions, we think!

And finally, evaluation requires better resourcing 

On day one of the conference our Director Dr Omar Khan threw an impromptu question out to the audience – he asked people to raise their hand if they felt they didn’t have enough resource to carry out the evaluation work they wanted to do. The majority of hands shot straight up.

We spoke to lots of people across the two days about the issues they’re facing around resourcing. We hear this time and time again from the sector – we are certainly aware of these issues – but having these informal conversations really helped crystallise this for us.

We know we must keep these limitations in mind as we continue to work with the sector and we are here to support teams both large and small deliver on their evaluations. As always, we encourage the sector to utilise our resources and feel assured that we will help the sector achieve their goals.

We want to thank everyone who attended our conference this year. We’ve got plenty more events, launches and more coming up over the summer so stay tuned…  and sign up to our newsletter so you don’t miss out.