AccessHE Team Spotlight – June 2020

Gerry (Uni Connect Outreach Coordinator – NW London): “The outreach hub have spent the last few weeks preparing and creating delivery of activity for young people across London. Online outreach has been a new realm to navigate for many Uni Connect partnerships including AccessHE’s Outreach hub. Getting to grips with many school safeguarding policies has led to creative approaches such as live streaming on platforms such as YouTube and new collaborative events such as the London Careers Festival. The online activity has also led to teacher facing events such as the collaborating with AimHigher London and Universities to address the concerns  and provide solutions for teachers and careers leaders. Our networks of schools and local authorities have helped shape our work and will continue to do thisAn example of this is  exploring blended online learning platforms inspired by AccessHEOnline  to support access to the creative arts for Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority learners. Furthermore we are developing materials to support  and reassure parents and carers to understand and navigate higher education.”

Beth (Uni Connect Outreach Coordinator – N London): “The AccessHE Uni Connect Creative Campaign has received overwhelming interest and enthusiasm for a project which acts on the previous research and initiatives born out of the AccessHE Creative Forum. We have held planning meetings with all HE contributors across all subject clusters (Art & Design, Film/Media, Performing Arts, History of Art, Music) to iron out any elements before filming commences. We’re also very excited to welcome third sector arts organisations into the programme, which will be contributing to the creative career pathways and reflection modules. Discussions about the current project with schools  and CEPs in our Uni Connect Hub network have been wholly positive – an encouraging indication that the creative campaign will support the need of schools and students in the challenging academic year ahead! If any HEI member is interested in learning more about the project or has a third party organisation in mind that could expand the reach and potential of the content, please get in touch via NCOPHub@londonhigher.ac.uk.”

Richard (Deputy Head of AccessHE): “June and July are usually lively periods in the AccessHE calendar, and lockdown hasn’t changed that. In addition to a full calendar of e-forum meetings in the past few weeks, we’ve run several online outreach activities, both for learners, and for teachers and careers advisers. You can read more about the events in this e-bulletin.

Our experiences delivering these have shown that, whilst we’re continuing to learn by doing, the online format offers huge potential. The fact that we’ve been able to run large-scale conferences, taster lectures, student-led activities, virtual roundtables and more highlights the breadth of options that are available when it comes to doing widening access work. I was very grateful to have the chance to talk about some of those – and about the lessons we’ve learned taking outreach online – at NEON’s ‘Where to Next for Outreach?’ event on 1 July. The virtual space has lent itself very well to collaborative approach, in our view; we’d like to say thanks and give a tip of the hat again to all of the AccessHE members who have co-delivered activities with us and helped to make them such a success.“