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Cambridge Admissions Office have organised a series of briefing sessions in the coming weeks aimed at Schools Liaison Officers, Faculty/Department Outreach Staff, and any academics and staff members who will communicate with potential students.

This will be an informative session detailing examples of good practice in monitoring and evaluation, specifically related to outreach projects including those funded by the Widening Participation Project Fund. The session will cover general good practice in monitoring and evaluation, as well as featuring presentations from previous outreach projects detailing specific examples of monitoring and evaluation in practice.

A drop-in session to discuss evaluation issues and topics related to Access & Participation work. Things you might want to discuss include:

• Learn more about the Access & Participation Evaluation Community of Practice
• Challenges in evaluation and getting the data
• Networking
• Evidencing projects/programmes/interventions
• Find out more about the benefits of a theory of change
• How to do a self-assessment on your evaluation
• Learn more about Office for Students (OfS) regulatory requirements and guidance
• Sounding board for plans/ideas

Or anything else A&P evaluation related!

The series aims to help outreach practitioners at the University develop Evaluation Plans for their current projects and embed evaluation into the development of any future outreach activity.

To get the full benefit from the series, participants are expected to attend all three workshops. We understand that for practitioners this may be difficult due to workload, so we have allowed the option to sign up and indicate if you are unlikely to make one or more of the sessions. If you are unable to attend a session the expectation would be that you read up on the content before the subsequent session and complete any tasks.

NOTE: if you'd like to join the session remotely, please let us know in the Special Requirements section when booking. This will help us plan the session and manage physical numbers in the room.

Jacob Butler will deliver a talk on his recent masters project: The focus on quantitative data in outreach can lead to evaluation feeling more like a box-ticking exercise than an integral part of an event. Practitioner research, which is a framework intended to support those conducting research into their own practice, offers an approach that recognises the importance of sharing qualitative experiences and emphasises the need for clear communication between peers. I argue that adopting elements of this framework in our evaluation would help to share good practice, through an accessible record of our experiences, and encourage a more collaborative network across the many different areas in which we work. In this session, I will introduce practitioner research and how it can be applied to outreach, then open the floor to a discussion around its potential benefits and costs, with the aim of refining an approach that would work for all outreach practitioners in the university.

This session will be recorded and made available with the slides on the Access & Participation Community of Practice Teams channel.