AccessHE Team Spotlight – July 2019

Welcome to Team Spotlight – a light-hearted section in our monthly Connect e-bulletin (open to all – subscribe to it here) where you can learn about who we are at AccessHE and what we’ve been up to in the past month.

In July (check out last month’s entry here and our intro to this section here) our spotlight shone to reveal…

Vanessa: My last staff round-up ever! It has been a very busy month. The highlight has, of course, been the AccessHE Capital Summer School. This year, we welcomed 34 year 12 students from Greater Manchester to London for a three day /two night summer school. This just happened to fall on the hottest week of the year, but luckily everyone survived! You can read more about this here.

In AccessHE Online news: the University of Essex Linguistics Course is now live! The course was piloted in mid-July at the Billericay School with two cohorts of year 10 language students. Finally, in AccessHE Creative HE Apply Guide news: the first draft plan of the second version of the Guide has been circulated for Member approval. We hope to receive feedback in the next few weeks and to start gathering content in September!

Tanyel: Our Action Forums are officially over for this academic year. We closed out with the Care Experienced and Estranged Students Forum and heard a presentation from Accumulate, a charity partner of Ravensbourne University that tackles youth homelessness through creative projects. The Forum also took part in an discussion on the English care system from ex-AccessHE employee Sam Turner, now at Become. Members found the session insightful, reminding us of the realities, facts and figures behind the learners we serve, in a non-HE context. Our Disability Forum confirmed the programme for University Information Day 2019 (2018’s event here) and we made our first communications to the Advocates network of schools, colleges and local authorities about our Disabled Student Allowance awareness-raising resource. Having now met with the majority of Forum Chairs, I’ll now use the summer downtime to develop Forum projects, redesign the website and prepare for 2019-20’s set of meetings!

Richard: Over the past few weeks, I’ve been continuing to build connections with local authority and educational partners in the London Uni Connect Outreach Hub for London, which is now coming into sharper relief. Recruitment is underway for four new posts to support the hub – they are really exciting positions with a broad remit for building new forms of collaborative HE outreach so please do check them out and share them in your networks! Aside from ongoing work on the outreach hub, I enjoyed teaming up with Vanessa last week to run a summer school for a visiting group of school and college students from Greater Manchester. The programme coincided with the worst of the July heatwave but I was impressed with the stamina of our group, who participated enthusiastically in a range of HE and careers taster sessions run by our Members, despite the soaring temperatures.

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