To support student success and reduce equality gaps, higher education providers (HEPs) offer interventions such as transition support, mentoring and academic skills support. 

HEPs collect a wide range of data about their students such as demographics, class attendance, interaction with virtual learning environments, and attainment. This institutional data can be used to evaluate the success of these interventions but these evaluations are often limited in scope because student engagement with support services is not recorded.

What are we doing?

To help the sector generate evidence about what works to support student success we have appointed four HEPs (University of Huddersfield, Lancaster University, Nottingham Trent University and University of East Anglia) who will provide institutional data, including student engagement with specific support interventions, for evaluation.

A team from Staffordshire University have been appointed as independent evaluators for the work. The final report is due to be published in summer 2024.

In addition to the final report there will be several other project outputs designed to help support the sector effectively evaluate student success:

  • A post-entry typology of student success activities (a sister to the pre-entry mapping tool) to enable consistent recording of student engagement with post-entry interventions. (Due February/March 2024)
  • A guide to using and developing data infrastructure to make effective use of institutional data to evaluate student success activities. (Due summer 2024)
  • Four Enhanced Theories of Change, one for each HEP, describing in detail each of the student success activities, and the associated change mechanisms and causal pathways. (Due summer 2024)