Widening Participation - Student Workshops

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Widening Participation - Student Workshops

This academic year Causeway Education launched a series of CPD events for Widening Participation (WP) professionals. The topics have been developed based on the requests we receive from WP departments for their own team training.

Last term, we ran a session on high impact student workshops, exploring accessible approaches to ensure every student is as engaged and learning as much as possible in your sessions. This term, I will be running a session on objective-led planning, predominantly based on the increase in the use of progressive frameworks in the sector.

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Are you one of the 23% of teachers that includes the top piece of advice from admissions tutors when marking a personal statement?

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Are you one of the 23% of teachers that includes the top piece of advice from admissions tutors when marking a personal statement?

What is it about personal statement writing that makes students suddenly start to express themselves in such a strange yet entirely predictable way? The fiery language comes out; ‘passion’, ‘sparked’, and ‘ignited’ combined with connectives like ‘furthermore’, ‘moreover’ and ‘thus’ while the whole piece overflows with unbridled enthusiasm expressed with the help of Microsoft Word’s synonym finder. Anyone who regularly reviews personal statements will already be nodding. Here at Causeway we have been supporting students in state schools to write better personal statements for seven years, but now much of our focus is on supporting schools to truly understand what makes a good application.

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Supporting the supporters: how can we help teachers to provide high-quality information, advice and guidance to young people?

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Supporting the supporters: how can we help teachers to provide high-quality information, advice and guidance to young people?

Fionna McLauchlan, our Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Manager, has been looking at data showing how important it is to support teachers so they can make sure young people get the guidance they need when looking at their options for post-18 choices.

We know from our work with schools that young people often turn to their teachers for information, advice and guidance (IAG) on post-18 pathways, and a recent Office for Students (2018) poll found that 68 per cent of prospective students had consulted or would consult their teachers for advice on what, and where, to study. This result was ahead of friends and peers (67 per cent) and websites (60 per cent).

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