Cambridge Admissions Office course timetable

This session is aimed at colleagues across the collegiate University who work with prospective students through admissions and outreach activity. In this session, the Director of Admissions, Sam Lucy will run through some of the common but trickier questions and how to answer them well.

We’re keen to include as many of the questions you find challenging as possible. Please add any questions you would like included here, or send via email to departmentliaison@admin.cam.ac.uk.

This session will be held via Zoom, the details of which will be circulated before the event. The session will also be recorded.

The session will help participants to consider the various audiences that they might deliver to in their roles, with a focus on those in a widening participation context. It will explore ways to engage those audiences and how to embed interactivity and higher order thinking skills into sessions delivered in person and virtually.

The course will be run via Zoom and these details will be circulated to registered participants.

WP Groups and Criteria - What do all the acronyms mean?

Don’t know your POLAR from your TUNDRA? Is FSM the same as PP? Are all students with disabilities considered SEN?

This session aims to demystify the wonderful world of widening participation terms and provide an overview of different groups which may be considered ‘WP’. Using the WP Selection Criteria paper (enrolment key: WP@CAM) as a basis, we will define each term/group and discuss the research behind whether they are underrepresented in higher education or face educational disadvantage, as well as any considerations or shortcomings in some of the criteria. At the end, we will talk through how the priority criteria was constructed.

This introductory session would be suitable for anyone with an interest in widening participation, including both practitioners, managers and senior leads, and will be of particular use for newer staff in this area.

Note: this session has a follow up session which will focus on the more practical side of implementing the WP Selection Criteria.

This training will be held via Zoom, the details of which will be circulated before the session.

“Help, my WP programme is so popular I have 10,000 students for only 10 spaces, what do I do?” We’ve all been there, but whether you have an incredibly oversubscribed programme or just want to make sure your programme is working with the right people, this training is for you.

In this session we will go through the University’s agreed upon WP Selection Criteria and discuss how practitioners can implement this in their own activities. We will start by looking briefly at targeting and the tools available to help outreach practitioners target their programme to the right people. We will talk about selection: what types of programmes this type of selection criteria is most suitable for, run through some practical considerations in applying the criteria and suggest some methods for easily sorting your data to help with selections.

This session assumes you have either read the WP Selection Criteria paper (enrolment key: WP@CAM) for background, or have attended the previous WP Groups and Criteria training session.

This training will be held via Zoom, the details of which will be circulated before the session.