Understanding the impact of outreach on access to higher education: an institutional approach.

Tender description

Please Note: This is an OFFA tender opportunity for which the procurement process is run by HEFCE. The Office for Fair Access (OFFA), in partnership with The Sutton Trust, wish to place a contract for a principal investigator (PI) to develop a methodology that can be used by universities to improve understanding and evaluation of the impact of outreach on access to higher education for young people from low and middle income backgrounds who would be the first in their family to attend university. The contract is for: phase one (July 2016 to March 2017): the development and publication of a common evaluation methodology that combines robust quantitative and qualitative methods for outreach activity. The long term goal of this project is to improve the evidence for outreach approaches most commonly used by universities. The first phase of the project, which this tender document refers to, aims to develop a methodology for robust evaluations of a selection of the most promising outreach approaches. Based on the outcomes of phase one, we aim to develop a second phase in which a group of universities pilot the methodology developed.