Evaluation of outreach interventions for under 16 year olds. Tools and guidance for higher education providers

During 2017-18, OFFA commissioned research that aimed to understand the nature of outreach activities for under 16 year olds (which were funded through access and participation investment) and how these were evaluated. This document, developed from the research, is intended to act as a resource for pre-16 outreach practitioners and evaluators, drawing both on the data collected by this project and the wider literature around evaluation and outreach. It seeks to recognise the complexity of pre-16 outreach work and eschews a prescriptive approach in favour of establishing important principles and actions that are likely to underpin good practice. Our discussion is broadly positioned within a ‘social realist’ worldview (Archer, 2008; Pawson, 2013) that seeks to understand the fuzzy nature of the cause-and-effect relationships that exist within complex social fields, where individuals construct their own realities in reference to those around them. There is a particular focus on epistemology – the pathways to creating dependable, if contingent, knowledge – as a vehicle for making meaning from data that is usually incomplete, compromised or mediated through young people’s emergent constructions of their worlds. Fundamentally, outreach is predicated on the ability of practitioners to influence young people in a planned way, albeit that the plan will not always work for every young person in every cohort. An important element in this epistemology is that it is not concerned with finding single ‘solutions’ that exist outside time and context. Rather, it is concerned with understanding how young people are influenced by their life experiences – not ‘what works’, but what works in a given context and, importantly, why. It is only through understanding the latter element that practices can become robustly effective in the long-term and potentially transferable to other contexts. This is particularly appropriate to pre-16 outreach work due to the lengthy time lag between activity and application to higher education (HE).Office for Students (OfS

Understanding the evaluation of access and participation outreach interventions for under 16 year olds

The project team was asked to address the following six research questions and these were used to guide the project: 1. What are the intended outcomes for current outreach interventions directed at under 16 year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds where the long-term aim is to widen access to higher education (HE)? 2. What types of outreach intervention activity or activities are institutions using in relation to intended outcomes? 3. What evaluation tools, methods and metrics are being used to measure the intended outcomes? 4. What are the perceived and actual challenges and barriers for different stakeholders to effective evaluation of long-term outreach? 5. What do different stakeholders consider most effective evaluation practice and why? 6. How valid and suitable are the evaluation tools, methods and metrics (identified through the research) that are commonly used? The project was constructed around six interlinked work packages: 1. A quantitative analysis of what higher education providers (HEPs) say about their pre-16 outreach activities (and their evaluation) in their 2017-18 access agreements (as the most recent available). 2. An online survey of HEPs to gather information about the pre-16 outreach activities delivered during the 2016-17 academic year and their evaluation, as well as the structure of their evaluation resources and challenges faced. 3. Case studies of four HEPs identified as demonstrating elements of good practice through their access agreements and the online survey, derived from telephone interviews with key staff and documentary analysis. 4. Telephone interviews with 11 third sector organisations (TSOs) to explore their practices and the evaluation of their activities, providing a counterpoint to the data collected from higher education institutions (HEIs). 5. A synthesis of the four preceding work packages to explore elements of good practice, determine a basis for assessing the quality of evaluations and highlight challenges for the sector and OFFA. 6. An invited participatory workshop for evaluators from HEPs and TSOs identified as demonstrating elements of good practice through the online survey and telephone interviews, to act as a sounding board for the emerging conclusions and recommendations.Office for Students (OfS

Class acts? Working class student officers in students’ unions

This article explores the recent emergence of ‘working-class student officer’ roles in students’ unions associated with elite UK universities. These student representative roles are designed to represent the interests of working-class students within their universities and sit alongside student representatives for liberation groups and/or student communities. Based on interviews with postholders and using Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field and Reay’s applications of a ‘reflexive habitus’, I explore how these students have come to assert a public and political ‘working-class student’ identity within their universities. Their commentaries reveal the ‘makings of class’ in a context where students are very aware of claims for recognition and the ‘hidden injuries of class’ and offer an insight into how working-class students are finding new ways to navigate their classed identities in HE

Under-tapped potential: practitioner research as a vehicle for widening participation

Practitioners working to widen participation to universities in England are an increasingly important and professionally diverse group but surprisingly absent from the academic literature and lacking in access to bespoke professional development pathways in HE. In England current approaches within policy and research also tend to position them as gatherers of evidence with a mission to inform change rather than developing their capacity to be(come) agents of change in their own right. Drawing on the perspectives of three widening participation practitioners who had recently completed a research-based MA, this paper explores the opportunity that this provided to illuminate the complexities encountered in routine practice, contributing to positive change. Rather than being methodologically inferior, practitioner research emerged as highly complementary and in the case of WP its transformative potential is currently hugely under-tapped

Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis--Current Dilemmas, Unanswered Questions, Challenges and Priority Needs

Tuberculosis was declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1993. Following the declaration and the promotion in 1995 of directly observed treatment short course (DOTS), a cost-effective strategy to contain the tuberculosis epidemic, nearly 7 million lives have been saved compared with the pre-DOTS era, high cure rates have been achieved in most countries worldwide, and the global incidence of tuberculosis has been in a slow decline since the early 2000s. However, the emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis, extensively drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis, and more recently, totally drug-resistant tuberculosis pose a threat to global tuberculosis control. Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is a man-made problem. Laboratory facilities for drug susceptibility testing are inadequate in most tuberculosis-endemic countries, especially in Africa; thus diagnosis is missed, routine surveillance is not implemented, and the actual numbers of global drug-resistant tuberculosis cases have yet to be estimated. This exposes an ominous situation and reveals an urgent need for commitment by national programs to health system improvement because the response to MDR tuberculosis requires strong health services in general. Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and XDR tuberculosis greatly complicate patient management within resource-poor national tuberculosis programs, reducing treatment efficacy and increasing the cost of treatment to the extent that it could bankrupt healthcare financing in tuberculosis-endemic areas. Why, despite nearly 20 years of WHO-promoted activity and >12 years of MDR tuberculosis–specific activity, has the country response to the drug-resistant tuberculosis epidemic been so ineffectual? The current dilemmas, unanswered questions, operational issues, challenges, and priority needs for global drug resistance screening and surveillance, improved treatment regimens, and management of outcomes and prevention of DR tuberculosis are discussed

Tuberculosis diagnostics and biomarkers: needs, challenges, recent advances, and opportunities

Tuberculosis is unique among the major infectious diseases in that it lacks accurate rapid point-of-care diagnostic tests. Failure to control the spread of tuberculosis is largely due to our inability to detect and treat all infectious cases of pulmonary tuberculosis in a timely fashion, allowing continued Mycobacterium tuberculosis transmission within communities. Currently recommended gold-standard diagnostic tests for tuberculosis are laboratory based, and multiple investigations may be necessary over a period of weeks or months before a diagnosis is made. Several new diagnostic tests have recently become available for detecting active tuberculosis disease, screening for latent M. tuberculosis infection, and identifying drug-resistant strains of M. tuberculosis. However, progress toward a robust point-of-care test has been limited, and novel biomarker discovery remains challenging. In the absence of effective prevention strategies, high rates of early case detection and subsequent cure are required for global tuberculosis control. Early case detection is dependent on test accuracy, accessibility, cost, and complexity, but also depends on the political will and funder investment to deliver optimal, sustainable care to those worst affected by the tuberculosis and human immunodeficiency virus epidemics. This review highlights unanswered questions, challenges, recent advances, unresolved operational and technical issues, needs, and opportunities related to tuberculosis diagnostics

Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis—Current Dilemmas, Unanswered Questions, Challenges, and Priority Needs

Tuberculosis was declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1993. Following the declaration and the promotion in 1995 of directly observed treatment short course (DOTS), a cost-effective strategy to contain the tuberculosis epidemic, nearly 7 million lives have been saved compared with the pre-DOTS era, high cure rates have been achieved in most countries worldwide, and the global incidence of tuberculosis has been in a slow decline since the early 2000s. However, the emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis, extensively drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis, and more recently, totally drug-resistant tuberculosis pose a threat to global tuberculosis control. Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis is a man-made problem. Laboratory facilities for drug susceptibility testing are inadequate in most tuberculosis-endemic countries, especially in Africa; thus diagnosis is missed, routine surveillance is not implemented, and the actual numbers of global drug-resistant tuberculosis cases have yet to be estimated. This exposes an ominous situation and reveals an urgent need for commitment by national programs to health system improvement because the response to MDR tuberculosis requires strong health services in general. Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and XDR tuberculosis greatly complicate patient management within resource-poor national tuberculosis programs, reducing treatment efficacy and increasing the cost of treatment to the extent that it could bankrupt healthcare financing in tuberculosis-endemic areas. Why, despite nearly 20 years of WHO-promoted activity and >12 years of MDR tuberculosis-specific activity, has the country response to the drug-resistant tuberculosis epidemic been so ineffectual? The current dilemmas, unanswered questions, operational issues, challenges, and priority needs for global drug resistance screening and surveillance, improved treatment regimens, and management of outcomes and prevention of DR tuberculosis are discusse

Tuberculosis Diagnostics and Biomarkers: Needs, Challenges, Recent Advances, and Opportunities

Tuberculosis is unique among the major infectious diseases in that it lacks accurate rapid point-of-care diagnostic tests. Failure to control the spread of tuberculosis is largely due to our inability to detect and treat all infectious cases of pulmonary tuberculosis in a timely fashion, allowing continued Mycobacterium tuberculosis transmission within communities. Currently recommended gold-standard diagnostic tests for tuberculosis are laboratory based, and multiple investigations may be necessary over a period of weeks or months before a diagnosis is made. Several new diagnostic tests have recently become available for detecting active tuberculosis disease, screening for latent M. tuberculosis infection, and identifying drug-resistant strains of M. tuberculosis. However, progress toward a robust point-of-care test has been limited, and novel biomarker discovery remains challenging. In the absence of effective prevention strategies, high rates of early case detection and subsequent cure are required for global tuberculosis control. Early case detection is dependent on test accuracy, accessibility, cost, and complexity, but also depends on the political will and funder investment to deliver optimal, sustainable care to those worst affected by the tuberculosis and human immunodeficiency virus epidemics. This review highlights unanswered questions, challenges, recent advances, unresolved operational and technical issues, needs, and opportunities related to tuberculosis diagnostic