Disadvantage defined

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) has produced a document which “provides guidance on targeting outreach activities at young people from communities under-represented in higher education (HE)”. Some of you might think that it would have been wise to have sorted this out before spending millions of pounds but I’m not one of those moaning minnies http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/hefce/2007/07%5F12/
For anyone working on widening participation related projects these guidelines are essential reading. As they are to be implemented from autumn 2007, I would suggest checking that you are HEFCE compliant as soon as possible. I particularly liked the rule of thumb that “Aimhigher partnerships and HE providers should aim to ensure that around two-thirds of participants in widening participation activities are from the target group.” The good news is that we appear to be ahead of the government’s game, as we have been evaluating our work in the terms that HEFCE recommend for the past 12 months. The only slightly surprising feature is the modified categorisation of adult employment which we can easily incorporate.

Overall, I welcome these guidelines, as they are relatively tight and proscriptive and should help us engage with disadvantaged populations.

HEFCE has promised universities and Aimhigher assistance with local data in order to identify qualifying neighbourhoods and schools. In the past, a number of universities have said they found this data difficult to obtain: frankly this claim is disingenuous. Even without HEFCE help, excellent school and neighbourhood data can be easily marshalled from two major on-line sources. If we find that partner organisations are claiming that a lack of local data is making evaluation difficult, then we at the Brightside Trust can show them how to construct their own local map.

Firstly, the government’s national statistics office, neighbourhood statistics http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/LeadHome.do;jsessionid=ac1f930bce6048c8bb53e5240d89babfb8ebe040ced.e38PbNqOa3qRe34LbxuNah4ObNj0n6jAmljGr5XDqQLvpAe?bhcp=1 Why not try your own postcode and see the range of datasets that can be drawn upon. If looking in detail, I recommend choosing the ‘more areas’ tab in section 2 and then selecting ‘lower layer super output area’, as your unit of choice. This has emerged as the fashionable unit of analysis among the pointy head analysts of neighbourhoods in the UK and will be the HEFCE unit of choice when they get their act together. Indeed, if you really want to be part of the ‘in’ crowd, use the other tab on the data sets screen to get a view of the range of stats available. Note lower layer super output areas can be found by postcode, so as long as you know a student’s postcode then you can define their neighbourhood as disadvantaged or not. For individual school details, ask the student which school they attend and then draw on the OFSTED website http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/portal/site/Internet/menuitem.2daefc8f97e956fe628a0d8308c08a0c/?vgnextoid=ba6a8587fd24a010VgnVCM1000008192a8c0RCRD, where every school in the UK’s latest inspection report can be downloaded. This provides considerable detail of both the schools performance, including the strengths and weaknesses of individual subject departments as well as the demographic and social profile of its pupil population.

There can be no excuses for non-compliance!

So, I hear you ask, how are people going to bend the rules. I know where I’d begin: there are some small neighbourhoods which are sharply divided between advantaged and disadvantaged, especially in cities, especially in London. For example, neighbourhoods in Islington where multimillion pound properties stand over the road from Victorian council flats. Even with lower layer super output area small area analysis, these neighbourhoods will average out as disadvantaged (each area has around 2000 people). Who’d care to bet that some universities haven’t already identified the post codes of these ‘golden’ lower layer super output areas and will be especially welcoming to its residents.