SUPI Coordination Day April 2014

Dr Jenni Chambers

Senior Policy Manager, RCUK PER

jenni.chambers@rcuk.ac.uk

Feedback from annual reports 1/2

• Overall, PERN and SAB were impressed by the progress made by the SUPIs in their first year of activity and praised their hard work, both in university and school environments. 

• Common challenges exist across several of the reports and SUPIs are encouraged to share approaches and learning with each other and to utilise the support offered by the NCCPE and RCUK. – Mismatches in the timings of peak activity periods in the school and university

calendars – Securing Early Career Researcher involvement were shown to be particularly

prevalent issues.

• PERN and SAB noted that the reporting templates were populated in differing ways and will revise the template and associated guidance in future years, with a view to ensuring more consistent fundamental metric data capture amongst all 12 SUPIs.

Feedback from annual reports 2/2

• None of the annual reports sufficiently documented the teacher perspective and this will need to be addressed in future reporting.

• PERN and SAB agreed that the case studies supplied could be an extremely useful resource and would like the SUPIs to work with the NCCPE, in conjunction with RCUK, to develop these for wider dissemination on the NCCPE and/or RCUK websites.

• Evaluation was referenced by a number of SUPIs, PERN and SAP recognise the importance of establishing evaluation expectations as early as possible and look forward to working with you on this issue.

• Difficulties meeting the costs of NCCPE or RCUK facilitated events were raised by several SUPIs. Whilst we are unable to offer additional funding for university team members to attend these meetings as they were explicitly referenced in the SUPI call, we are able to cover costs to encourage members of the partnerships based in schools to participate.

SUPI Aims

• Inspire the next generation by facilitating engagement between secondary school students and researchers to bring contemporary research into formal and informal learning contexts to enhance the curriculum and raise ambition

• Reach secondary school students from a diversity of backgrounds and abilities and engage the widest possible range of teachers and schools in ways which have maximum impact on teaching quality and learning

• Provide researchers (nb ECRs) with opportunities and training to engage with secondary school students and develop their transferable skills as outlined in the Researcher Development Framework (RDF)

• Support secondary schools and HEIs to work together to create structured, strategic, sustainable and equitable mechanisms for school-university engagement which increases the breadth and quality of interactions between researchers and students.

Potential evaluation questions 1/2

To what extent has inclusion been enhanced by the programme?

To what extent has the programme enabled researchers to acquire and apply relevant engagement skills?

How has the programme influenced teaching & learning in the engaged schools? Has this influenced attainment and aspiration?

How has the programme facilitated the development of structured, strategic, sustainable and equitable partnerships between the schools and unis?

Potential evaluation questions 2/2

What have been the most effective models for engaging pupils with contemporary research?

What key factors have influenced interest and ambition in pupils engaged, across all abilities?

Has the facilitation of learning across projects been effective to:• support project development? • share learning with other stakeholders?

What have been the most important learning points from this programme?

How we can answer these questions…

To what extent has inclusion been enhanced by the programme? New partners: diversity of schools, teachers, pupils newly engaged – school and uni data, pupil premium etc)

To what extent has the programme enabled researchers to acquire and apply relevant engagement skills? Have they gone on to do more stuff with these skills? No. of researchers engaged in training and no. of researchers delivering activities. Impact on future activity eg teaching? (HEBCI data)

How has the programme influenced teaching & learning in the engaged schools? Has this influenced attainment and aspiration? Ask teachers – qualitative feedback? eg how dept. plans have changed? Repeat business? Involve others? Acting as champion for programme. Pupil attainment? Pupil engagement?

How we can answer these questions…

How has the programme facilitated the development of structured, strategic, sustainable and equitable partnerships between the schools and unis? which models work? which don’t? why?) Are partnerships continuing? What’s changed in terms of structures/processes to support it? Needs input from HEI and schools. Who’s driving demand?

What have been the most effective models for engaging pupils with contemporary research? evaluation of key interventions

What key factors have influenced interest and ambition in pupils engaged, across all abilities? evaluation of key interventions

How we can answer these questions…

Has the facilitation of learning across projects been effective to:• support project development? eg evaluation of key events by NCCPE• share learning with other stakeholders? who knows about project and how involved? who's using the guidance/tools developed?

What have been the most important learning points from this programme? E.g. Annual reports/Strategic, Unis, schools and pupils, RCUK, NCCPE

Your thoughts

Do these questions allow us to demonstrate meeting the aims of the SUPI call?

What do you think might be missing?

What data (quantitative and qualitative) can we ensure we collect to be able to answer these questions?