Achieving Excellence By Helping More Students To Get On – Trialling New Tools To Demonstrate What Works

This paper addresses one of the disbenefits of current HE provision, which is the differential in outcomes for students according to certain demographic characteristics. The same students are also less likely to engage with available advice and guidance. The sector needs to do to more to support an increasingly diverse student population. We redefine student engagement interventions as focussed attempts to change behaviour at both the individual and institutional level. We then adopt a change framework used in other sectors to assess a suite of student engagement interventions all designed to support students entering the university with a characteristic that indicates risk of disadvantage. Disciplined codification of interventions required allows better evaluation of what is effective and scalable, leading to improved retention and achievement of all students. The work also contributes to an emerging behaviour change ontology advocated for use in a range of disciplines and countries.