Recommendations :
a ) Partnership legacy building
Stakeholders in schools and colleges have requested SUN expand the partnership offer to include additional contacts who work with young people in the SUN region and local employers . SUN should look to instigate this in the next phase as it directly links to the OfS objective of local collaboration .
Schools were keen for local employers to be engaged more directly with schools , via SUN , to assist in achieving Gatsby Benchmark aim 5 . School staff also commented that future SUN work should aim to support the emerging Ofsted framework with greater interest in student wellbeing 6 .
In addition to this , the strengthening of pre-existing partnerships should be supported further . This could be undertaken a number of different ways for example , the continuation of the SUN operating group enabling more coherent planning and communication across the region and across stakeholders .
Communication to all stakeholders should be reviewed for Phase 2 with the emphasis on legacy building , sharing of best practice and concise messaging for planning purposes .
“ But when we contact the university sometimes what we find is , we ' re not always speaking to the right people about who is responsible for their outreach programme and coming in to share that information with students .” SPoC Southampton School
“ I think another advantage of a core offer would be that it would be very useful for the progression mentors themselves . I think that would be really good for them in terms of confidence and they ' d all be able to support each other there a group of mentors because they ' re all working on it .” FEC
b ) Embedding robust evaluation based on theory and practice
OfS do not release further guidance on evaluation expectations until April 2019 so this report does not provide recommendations on any amendments to pre-existing evaluation frameworks created by SUN .
Recommendations for evaluation in Phase 2 should focus on improved communication and disseminations of findings , further embedding evaluation across the network and ensuring that all evaluation methods are based on theory and evidence gained from previous practice .
For this to happen , it is recommended the following are considered :
i . ii .
iii . iv .
Progression Framework is embedded across all SUN funded interventions Expansion of the SUN evaluation and monitoring group to become a space for dissemination , sharing best practice and offer opportunities for collaborative research and evaluation activities Further use of survey and evaluation tools from published research Additional CPD opportunities for SUN and wider HEP outreach staff on evaluation methods
6 https :// www . gov . uk / government / consultations / education-inspection-framework-2019-inspecting-the-substance-of-education
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