Student access and support plans secure OfS approval

Our plans to ensure people from all backgrounds get the same opportunities while studying at Reading have been approved by the Office for Students (OfS).

Our Access and Participation Plan (APP) for the academic years 2024/25 to 2027/28 sets out our strategies and objectives to support students from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds before, during and after their higher education.

An approved APP is a condition of registration with the OfS, allowing universities and colleges to charge tuition fees above the basic level. From 2024/25 onwards, APPs will be reviewed every four years, and we are part of a ‘first wave’ of 40 institutions to undergo a new regulatory set of requirements.

Target objectives and strategies

Chaired by Professor Peter Miskell, the APP is overseen by the Access and Participation Committee (APC).

This includes a writing group who devised our target objectives and intervention strategies in the next APP. These outline plans to:

1. Increase support at GCSE and A-Level, through targeted initiatives with partner schools, to help students from deprived backgrounds and of Black ethnicity to progress through University.
2. Ensure our student population better represents the diverse demographic in our wider region.
3. Eliminate degree outcome gaps that correlate with ethnicity and deprivation.
4. Better promote bursaries and other financial support we offer to applicants and students.
5. Provide tutoring, mentoring and visits to the University, working with partner schools, and targeted application support.
6. Better support underrepresented students to settle at University and simplify rules and processes by which students progress through their University studies.
7. Offer support and guidance with Decolonising the Curriculum.
8. Listen to feedback from students, including those who were unable to complete their degrees, to learn about barriers they faced.

The activities to address these objectives include, amongst others, our flagship Reading Scholars programme designed to give school students an authentic taste of life as a university undergraduate, various school level awarding gap interventions, the Portfolio Review Pathway project. and the Reading Internship Scheme to support student progression into the workplace.

Our evaluation strategy

The new APP will have a stronger emphasis on evaluation, and includes plans to build capacity and expertise amongst staff and colleagues engaged in these activities.

Chaired by Professor Billy Wong, we have established an Access and Participation Evaluation Subcommittee (APES) to review, discuss, critique and support the evaluation planning and reporting of activities across our intervention strategies in the APP.

We have an APP Evaluation Hub Teams channel for activity leads, where resources are curated and shared. The APP Evaluation team has been working closely with individual activity and intervention strategy leads to review, reflect on and refine approaches to evaluation in their respective contexts.

Working closely with Lydia Fletcher, Research and Evaluation Manager (Access & Participation), all 23 activities in our APP have clear outcomes and indicators of success. A blog of our progress was recently published on Wonkhe.

Reflection reports

A number of reports from colleagues across the University contributed to the APP Plan:

Access and Outreach 

• Ten Years of Reading Scholars by Kizzi Keast and David Dobraszczyk

Student Success and Engagement 

• Inclusion Consultant Pilot by Mathew Haine
• Student Finance Bursary by Matt Daley

Progression and careers 

• Reading Internship Scheme by Fiorella Illes
• Finalist programme by Graham Philpott

These are available to download on our student-facing APP website, under ‘Evaluation and Reports’