Ipsos | Uni Connect Phase 3 : Attainment-raising Activity – Final Report
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2.2.3 Addressing local need Partnerships sought to prioritise the local area ’ s specific attainment needs , either at a school or area level . For example , one partnership identified through research that their area had significantly lower literacy attainment levels than the national average and used this to inform their attainment-raising delivery . Other approaches to address local need were also taken ( e . g . discussions with school senior leadership ) to provide a bespoke response with genuine intentions to improve attainment :
“ Our strategy really responds to the region , to the needs of schools , and to the needs of young people rather than it being a recruitment exercise which it can sometimes be for [ higher education ] institutions .” ( Partnership lead ).
In another example , to avoid over-saturation of activities being delivered to schools , one partnership identified that academic study support was a “ flooded market ” in their area and thus chose to take a study skills approach instead .
Some partnerships noted that often local need and national need are one and the same . The schools they worked with have similar needs to address . This was supported by findings from the school survey reporting similar activities being delivered across partnerships to similar target learners .
2.3 Selection of schools and learners
Summary : All partnerships have criteria for targeting learners , however they tended not to be rigid with applying it in practice and schools tended to lead on selecting learners to take part in the activities . However , there were some exceptions where activities had a specific target group , such as learners with special educational needs and disabilities ( SEND ). Most partnerships decided to offer high impact activity to a few schools , meaning they had deliberately smaller delivery targets . At the time of the interviews , most had not reached their targets yet as there were still substantial amounts of delivery planned for the rest of the academic year .
2.3.1 Selecting schools As this was the first full year of delivery , most partnerships decided to offer higher impact activity to a few schools rather than less intensive activity for a larger number of schools . This meant partnerships often set deliberately smaller targets for their attainment-raising activities . To select schools , most partnerships already had an established list of priority schools based on criteria such as deprivation and school-level attainment data . This was supported by the May 2024 survey of schools , where 68 % of schools reported that they have previously engaged with Uni Connect prior to the introduction of attainment-raising activities . This informed an assessment of need , which was often combined with discussions with school leaders to gauge their interest . Some partnerships actively identified schools where they have strong existing relationships to help support initial buy-in and engagement . They reflected that other schools would likely want to see examples or case studies of how the delivery has worked in practice before being willing to embed the activities , meaning they leveraged relationships with high levels of existing trust .
In some cases , partnerships have worked with fewer schools than planned , as they aimed to focus on effective delivery in a select number of schools rather than more limited delivery in a larger number of schools . However , at the time of interviews in February 2023 , partnerships still had substantial amounts of delivery planned for the rest of the academic year . Overall , the estimated scale of delivery can be summarised as follows :
20-048464 | FINAL | Public | This work was carried out in accordance with the requirements of the international quality standard for Market Research , ISO 20252 , and with the Ipsos MORI Terms and Conditions which can be found at http :// www . ipsos-mori . com / terms .