Assessment of the online business support offer : growth and improvement service, my new business and helpline

This study provides the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) with an early understanding of whether online business support services provided by Business Link have performed effectively against the strategic objective of ‘digital transformation’. That is to successfully assist businesses through a website rather than through higher cost services (for example face to face contact). The study also makes an early assessment of the value of the services provided to new users, with a focus on cost effectiveness and effective referral to other appropriate business support services in the public, private and third sectors. The support services include the comprehensive start-up service provided by My New Business, and online tools provided by the Growth Improvement Service, enabling businesses to identify and solve problems

Progression of college students in England to higher education: BIS research paper number 239

This report presents the findings of research undertaken for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) into the progression to higher education of students from all the FE Colleges and Sixth Form Colleges in England. It is longitudinal research and the report relates to cohorts of students between the academic years 2007-08 and 2011-12 entering higher education (HE) between the years 2008-09 and 2012-13. This research provides a unique and comprehensive picture of the very different factors underlying the progression behaviour of students progressing to higher education from colleges rather than from school sixth forms. It is unique because it traces progression into both full and part-time higher education and into higher education offered in colleges themselves as well as universities. It is comprehensive because it looks at both the college courses that students progress from and the HE courses they progress to and it analyses trends over time looking at underlying demographic data. It illustrates the added value that FE and Sixth Form Colleges contribute by looking at the GCSE results students leave school with before going to college and it looks at the achievement rates of those awarded degrees including those with First and Upper Second class honours. The research findings are based on the matching of Individualised Learner Record (ILR) datasets for 2007-08 to 2011-12 for FE and Sixth Form College students that achieved Level 3 qualifications, with ILR and Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) datasets for 2008-09 to 2012-13. They provide a detailed analysis of the progression of students to higher education over time and the report breaks down progression into prescribed and non-prescribed higher education as well as progression to university and to higher education offered by FE Colleges (HE in FE). The matched records contain course level data as well as demographic information about the student cohorts such as age, gender, ethnicity and domicile including deprivation. The course level data provides details of the institutions and types of courses students progressed from (A level, Access, BTEC, NVQ, etc) and the programmes and institutions they progressed to. This richness in the data provides a wide set of variables that can be intersected and compared and this report provides a selection of the key factors arising from the analysis. There is the opportunity to drill down further into the data to obtain more detailed regional, institutional or themed outputs. The methodology underpinning the analysis has been developed with HESA and with HEFCE through previous research (Joslin & Smith, 2013; Joslin & Smith, 2013a and Joslin & Smith, 2014). An important new element has been included in this report, which is matching with the Department for Education’s Key Stage 4 (KS4) datasets. This has provided new information about the kinds of qualifications FE and Sixth Form College students leave school with and the role of colleges in transforming their life chances through providing the opportunity to achieve at Level 3 and to progress on to higher education

Reclaiming professional identity through postgraduate professional development: Career practitioners reclaiming their professional selves

Careers advisers in the UK have experienced significant change and upheaval within their professional practice. This research explores the role of postgraduate level professional development in contributing to professional identity. The research utilises a case study approach and adopts multiple tools to provide an in-depth examination of practitioners’ perceptions of themselves as professionals within their lived world experience. It presents a group of practitioners struggling to define themselves as professionals due to changing occupational nomenclature resulting from shifting government policy. Postgraduate professional development generated a perceived enhancement in professional identity through exposure to theory, policy and opportunities for reflection, thus contributing to more confident and empowered practitioners. Engagement with study facilitated development of confident, empowered practitioners with a strengthened sense of professional self

Evaluating the impact of serious games: the effect of gaming on entrepreneurial intent

Purpose - Serious games are playing an increasingly significant role across a range of educational contexts. Business focused serious games can provide students with an authentic learning experience and their use has been increasingly taken up by business school faculty, including those delivering entrepreneurship education. This paper seeks to evaluate the impact of participation in a serious business game on the Entrepreneurial Intent of undergraduate students. Design/methodology/approach - The study adopts a pre-test / post-test quasi-experimental design. It employs a modified version of Linan et al.’s (2011) Entrepreneurial Intent model in the form of a questionnaire survey completed by 263 undergraduate business and management students. Findings – A logic regression model was used to analyse the survey responses. The research findings indicate that the serious game used in this study has a significant negative impact on Entrepreneurial Intent. Gender and role model effects are also identified from the analysis. Originality/value - The paper contributes to the literature in two ways. Firstly, it demonstrates the impact of serious business games on Entrepreneurial Intent during the enterprise awareness stage of a student’s entrepreneurship education. Secondly, it provides a foundation for exploring the role that serious games can play in educating the potential entrepreneurs of the future

Academic libraries and student engagement: a literature review

The term ‘student engagement’ has a broad meaning and is used freely as an expression in several different contexts of academic librarianship. This literature review covers scholarship from across several of these areas and is structured so that four broad themes are systematically addressed: student engagement in learning; students as partners; student voice; methods and techniques for student engagement. The granular review of the literature reveals many sub-discussions about a range of academic librarianship topics and provides some discussion about how they cross over into the area of student engagement. The literature covers different innovations, techniques and strategies for student engagement, and the review illustrates how many techniques and tools are transferable across the different intentions and objectives of student engagement. The review concludes that many academic librarians are very proactive in student engagement activities and that student engagement itself has become a fundamental element of academic library management

Open Access Pump-Priming Expenditure Report University of Glasgow

Report on activity undertaken with a grant of £360k from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in support of Open Access to research outputs

Student budgets and widening participation: Comparative experiences of finance in low and higher income undergraduates at a Northern Red Brick University

Drawing on a thematic analysis of longitudinal qualitative data (ntotal = 118), this article takes a “whole student lifecycle” approach to examine how lower and higher income students at an English northern red brick university variously attempted to manage their individual budgets. It explores how students reconcile their income—in the form of loans, grants, and bursaries—with the cost of living. Four arenas of interest are described: planning, budgeting, and managing “the student loan”; disruptions to financial planning; the role of familial support; and strategies of augmenting the budget. In detailing the micro‐level constraints on the individual budgets of lower and higher income undergraduates, the article highlights the importance of non‐repayable grants and bursaries in helping to sustain meaningful participation in higher tariff, more selective, higher education institutions. It also supports an emerging body of literature that suggests that the continuing amendments to the system of funding higher education in England are unlikely to address inequality of access, participation, and outcome