>> Professor Sue Trinidad: I think I might get started because I know we're a little bit late in the afternoon, and everyone needs to probably go right on 5. I'd like to introduce you to Bernadette Sanderson who is all the way from sunny Scotland [laughter]. She's really enjoying our weather here because this is the summer, isn't it?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah.

>> Professor Sue Trinidad: It's summer over there. It's been wonderful having a few days with Bernadette. I've been able to go through the annual report from her wonderful programme and have a look at how much of this is very similar to what we're doing here in Australia. And we were lucky to meet last year at the FACE conference which is the Further and Continuing… Forum for Access and Continuing Education [laughter]. It's over in the UK and I sent Paul this year to make sure that we were represented. And next year, the conference is going to be in Ireland. So I'll let everybody know here just in case you would like to present all the wonderful work you've been doing. Because it's a great group of people that come together from around the world to share their projects and things that they're doing within equity, student equity space. I'll hand over to you, Bernadette, to step us through as Director of the schools for higher education programme, which is FOCUSWest.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Thank you so much, thank you so much for coming along today. Especially at this hour of the day. I know people are going home to their families. And I hope it's worth your time just to be able to come along and hear my presentation on insights from the UK. So thank you very much, thanks, Sue, for inviting me. I'm so glad to be here at the centre, beautiful space, to do my presentation.

My talk is on university partnerships for community and school system development. But I'm also going to talk a little bit about the national context within which I'm working, because that's very relevant to how the operational work happens on the ground and affecting everything at the moment. And you'll see here on my first slide that I'm talking about Scotland particularly which is where my work is based. And I've put here just slightly in jest that we are still part of the United Kingdom.

Our union has been on the go since 1707, and it looks as if we're heading for a divorce. And so there's been a referendum which took place in 2014. And lots of people voted to be independent of England. Although there came of the referendum was actually a no vote, but since then, there's been a general election, and in Scotland, most people have voted for the Scottish Nationalist Party. Which is a big deal for us because it means that the way people are thinking, the national psyche, is moving very much to be separate from the rest of the UK. And we already have a very devolved system in Scotland of education and other things such as law. We have our own legal system and lots of other things that are devolved. But it's very important for us because we enjoy a lot of benefits at the moment from being part of that bigger picture, being part of the UK. Not just the monetary system, but access to

research grants, access to all sorts of things, where the union has worked very well in the past. But it looks as if, you know, we might be heading for a bit of a divide in the future and obviously we'll see how that happens.

But for those of you who have not travelled to the UK before, this is our context. We're a very small country. Just over 5 million people, which, I think, is just about double the population of Perth. So we have a small population. We have a small land mass as well. And you would think that a policy area like widening access to higher education would work in such a small context, but we have a lot of the same problems as you have here in Australia, and I'm really interested to hear how things have been developing here and, perhaps, things that we can learn and apply back home in Scotland.

So just a little bit of context around that. I put this up, not just to make you feel relaxed about my presentation, but just an image of Scotland that many people have in their heads. So beautiful, rolling hills and heather, and an idyllic version of Scotland that some of you might have who've not travelled there. Or even an image like this which also exists in a lot of people's heads - a very kitsch, kind of touristy impression of the country. Although you do see quite a lot of this on the streets of Glasgow and in Edinburgh – [to Professor Trinidad] I don't know if you saw any of those? – so the pipers are piping.

But for me, the cane of reality of all the work that I do in widening access to higher education, because I work with secondary schools, is a very different kind of reality. I work with 40 secondary schools in the poorest parts of the city of Glasgow which is in the west of Scotland. And this kind of living situation in very poor flats is a sort of standard living situation for many of the young people that I work with. And this particular area is called Castlemilk. Which is very famous for having lots of gangs and a lot of poverty and a lot of generational worklessness. And it's really not the nicest place to grow up. So that's more the reality for me than those beautiful, touristy rolling hills, and all the rest of it.

So my programme is called the FOCUSWest programme. I've worked within the context of something called the Schools for Higher Education programme which is a Scottish government-funded programme. It's been running now since the year 2000, so we're in our 15th year. And it's a special, strategic programme in order to widen access to higher education. So this is how we call equity work back in Scotland, widening access to HE.

And FOCUSWest is an acronym that means Focus On College and University Study, and that's in the west of Scotland. We have college in there because our colleges in Scotland deliver quite a bit of higher education, and it's an alternative pathway, a different route to use, to get into university in Scotland. And it's a very underused pathway, so we try to promote that as much as we can.

So that's me and my programme. And I said here that I want to talk a wee bit before I talk about communities and partnerships just on how Scotland's progressing and that work on widening access to HE.

And I've said to you the good, the bad, and the ugly, but I'm not going to tell you what I think is the good, the bad, or the ugly - I'll let you work that out for yourselves.

So as I said before, Scotland is a population of just over 5 million people. And the next bit of information actually is something that looks very good. Our national participation in HE is sitting at about 36 per cent. And UK government makes a lot of noises about how they would like that figure to be up at 50 per cent so that 1 out of every 2 people is the holder of a degree, half of our adult population are graduates.

Well, we're sitting at 36 per cent, and that's about 10 per cent higher than what the figure used to be when I first came into this work about 15 years ago. So, so far, so good.

The second bullet here talks about a particular situation that we have in Scotland. We have no tuition fees for Scottish students. So students who are Scottish domicile who manage to access university directly do not pay any tuition fees. In the rest of the UK and England, there are fees, and those fees come in about 9,000 pounds per year. So a degree in England will cost you 27,000 pounds, in Scotland, we have 4 year degree so that would be 36,000 pounds. But if you're a Scottish student, you don't pay anything. That policy is a really… it’s the fruit of a very entrenched idea from the previous first minister of Scotland, a man called Alex Salmond. And he believed in this idea so much that he had a statement that is out on the web when he says the rocks will melt with sun on the day when Scottish students have to pay tuition fees. And he actually before he was defeated from his post, he actually commissioned a rock and he had that engraved on the rock, and it now sits on the campus of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.

So it's a very entrenched view, and our current first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, is of the same fixed mindset that there should be no tuition fees. And it's also something that divides us massively from our neighbours in England. Because in England, they are very pro those tuition fees. And, of course, in England, the tuition fees that the universities receive, allow them to grow and expand and develop and their campuses can build things, and you can do stuff, and they can develop their universities with those fees. Whereas in Scotland, with that capped system for home students, our university principals complain all the time they just haven't got the money. What they do try and do, therefore, is they try to expand this group so they have a huge recruitment drive and all the recruitment energy is spent on getting students to come up from England and to pay, and obviously international students as well.

>> John Phillimore: Excuse me, European students pay?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: European students are, they do pay, yeah. So there is a fee that comes with a European student status. And that also brings in income.

>> John Phillimore: But it's not as much as $9,000 pounds, is it?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: It's not the same, yeah, no.

>> John Phillimore: So a Danish or Belgium student would pay less than an English student?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah, they would, yeah. So that's also an interesting one as well so. There's a kind of a ranking that's happening there especially in terms of what welcome that message that sends out. I also, another thing I wanted to note here is that we have 19 higher education institutions in Scotland. And they are actually mandated by legislation to widen access to higher education. So that's now enshrined in legislation. That was put together in 2013, it's called the Post-16 Scotland Act. The reality of that legislation is such that if you read the actual wording around it, although the universities are required to do it, the devil is in the detail about what that means in practice. So it doesn't quite… to my mind, it doesn't quite have a bite but it looks as if it has, you know, at first viewing.

Other things about our Scottish system, we have 25 further education colleges which provide vocational qualifications. Many of these, the early part of these vocational qualifications articulate then and to university degrees. So that's a really good pathway for students that maybe don't get all the qualifications they need when they leave school. They can. There's a possibility that they can go to FE College and then they can move into university that way. We have 25 of those colleges.

And then another thing that's worth noting is that our school system has also been reformed recently. We used to have a very fragmented school system, where we had the nursery system pretty much just doing what it wanted doing, learning through play… A primary school system which pretty much did its own thing, and a secondary school system that really just prepared students for qualifications and exams. And this wasn't particularly joined together. And then we have something that started a couple years ago to unify this, called the curriculum for excellence, and a lot of resource has been spent unifying that system. So this is what's been happening for us across the various sectors of education back in Scotland and it all looks very good, doesn't it? So far, so worthy.

However, countering all that good stuff, we also have something that the Scottish Tourist Information Board would not want you to know about - although, this is just factual information - our unemployment stats are rising. So despite all of this good stuff that's been happening around the education agenda, when you look at labour markets and when you look at employment, those figures are creeping up nationally. So we're now sitting at 6 per cent and then cities like my hometown, Glasgow, have

some really serious problems with unemployment. And we are looking at a number of around about 30 per cent of unemployment in Glasgow. And that's a very bad figure. I mean, that's just not good for the health of a city or of a nation at all.

We have an issue around not just graduate labour markets, but labour markets per se. We don't manufacture very much anymore in Scotland, we don't really have a car industry, which is what many nations have as main exports. So we have a problem with that. So our young people look at this, and they, you know, you can't avoid this in Glasgow. And you know, even if your own family is in full employment, your neighbours will not be. So it's just something to bear in mind, you know, a backdrop against which we're working.

And also, just ally to that, we have a problem, a very live problem of poverty. A recent report showed that a really substantial number of Scottish people were living in poverty. And I don't know exactly how we've measured this around the [Bravelane?] report. But I think we're looking at essential household goods that people had access to. They came up with these numbers which, you know, are not great numbers. You know, talking about almost verging towards 1/5th of the entire population in Scotland creeping towards that Bravelane figure. And the numbers of children living in poverty has grown a lot in recent times.

So the economic situation - not that great when you think about it. And also I talked about working in Glasgow city. There are parts of Glasgow where I work, I mentioned Castlemilk, but a very famous St John’s Chapel and another place called Govan. In some of these communities, male life expectancy is only in the 40s. I think 44 or 46, you know. In some cases, the life expectancy in some of these parts of Glasgow is the same as your life expectancy in Iraq. Which is an appalling figure for a developed nation. So there's obviously a problem there. And government is aware of this, and they want to do something about it. They want to lift the educational level of the population. They want to start by looking at how they can work with young people to improve things. But there are some really big things that block all of that happening. You know, if we want to have more graduates in Scotland, this is very difficult in a system where we have a capped capacity of numbers that can access that system. And our universities don't help us always to make that happen, because for many of Scotland's universities, there's a very high tariff for direct entry. So the qualifications you need to access, direct access to university, usually you need As for everything in one sitting over time. So we have a capped number of places, and a very high entry system. And what that means is that the young people that I work with in some of the poorest communities and some of the, and the secondary schools where they don't have a great tradition of sending many people on to university, these kids just do not achieve the very high grades you need to get in. So that's, that gives us automatically, you know, an issue that we are working very hard to deal with.

And that takes me on to where I am based and where I do my work from. So as you can see from this slide, many of the universities present an image of themselves which is more to do with how exclusive they are and how elite they are and how difficult it is to get into a place like this. So you can see that my university, the University of Glasgow, likes to tell the world, this is one of the world's top 100 universities. So that they're in the top 1 per cent for research. That they have the excellent since 1451. And the kind of message often that that gives to the young people that I work with is that forget it, I can't go there. You know, this looks like Hogwarts from Harry Potter. I'll never, ever manage to get into a place like that. So, you know, the kind of message that that sends out is often one of “we are so elite,” you know, that's an immediate barrier. Our young people are put off, can be put off by that.

And so the ones who do access institutions like this, they have done incredibly well and we are really, really proud of them. But the kind of messages, as I say, that universities like this one give out are often purposefully about how exclusive they are and how elite they are. And in terms of widening access to higher education, that's difficult. You have an obvious conundrum there in terms of how you present the accessibility of such an elite institution. And it's not just Glasgow. My colleagues in Edinburgh are dealing with Edinburgh University, and that looks also like Hogwarts, you know. And that's also a very esteemed, respected, reserved institution, number 37th in the world, I think. And my colleagues in Aberdeen are the same, they're dealing with all of these tough factors in terms of access and how it's represented.

And this is just a wee example. It's an extreme example. But it just gives you a picture again of the kinds of barriers that exist. So if you look to the red writing here, you will see just what you need to get into a place like Glasgow University. And yes I have chosen medicine. But I've chosen that purposefully because many very young people do think about becoming doctors. And often they don't know that, they don't know that you need five A's for your higher exams when you finish school, in one sitting. They don't know about that because no one has really told them, you know, about how competitive it is to get into medicine to become a doctor. And especially if they're the first in their family to consider, you know, further studies, doing a degree.

And also we have a particular issue when we work with our schools because, I don't know if it's the same here - I spoke to someone earlier, we talked about boys? Yeah. Many of the boys we work with, we see a difference in terms of their capacity when they mature. They often mature a little bit later than girls. And although they're highly able, by the time they've kind of matured at school and woken up to the fact that they're going to have to study and they need these grades to become what they want to be, sometimes the boat has already sailed and the second chance is just not around to help them.

So as I say, that's a bit of an extreme example, but just to give you a bit of flavour of the kind of barriers you're working with.

Now I mentioned the good, the bad, and the ugly at the beginning, and I didn't want to say what I thought was the good, the bad, or the ugly. But just this slide will give you a bit of a picture of things that I see also as barriers in terms of widening access to higher education. I mentioned free tuition for Scottish students, but obviously nothing is really free in life. Obviously somebody's paying for it. At the same time as the free tuition for higher education came into being, Scottish government decided to reduce the number of further education colleges from 43 in the country to 25. You know, further education colleges have always traditionally been the places where you go if you have missed your first chance at school. If you're coming back into study, you go to your local college. And that local college will help you pick up with your literacy or your numeracy or your foreign languages or your science. Or all the many things that maybe grab your interest when you're a bit older and you’ve maybe missed your chance.

So because of the reduction in the number of these colleges, it means that students now cannot really access that second chance learning in the same way as they could in the past. Now I'm not saying that that was reduced in order to pay for the tuition fees, but, you know, governments work things out, right, the way they want to do it. And it must seem to me that this was a bit of a casualty of that particular policy in order to fund the free tuition. So that's one of the things that's been happening recently.

And then I mentioned this wonderful curriculum for excellence at the school level where we have the seamless transition and this meaningful curriculum. But also just ally with that of what is pretty obvious from this new curriculum. I mentioned in all this burgeoning nationalism that's growing for us. I mention this particularly because I used to be a languages teacher when I was a teacher before I came into working in access, I used to teach Russian. Now the money is being pumped into preserving national language, the Gaelic language in particular. So resource has been shifted away to suit a more nationalist flavour of education. And, you know, the backdrop has also been coloured by the fact that we have a leader of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, and our leader in England, David Cameron, really not quite seeing eye to eye over many things and this devolved position that we’re currently in, and what it's also leading to is potentially a break away for Scotland from England.

I know you might be thinking, well, where does that leave you in terms of your work and the kind of activities that you're doing to actually widen access to higher education? Well despite all of that stuff going on in the background, we still have our funding, and I'm just thankful and delighted that we have our money to keep going and to keep progressing our work. And one of the things that is good about the work that our national government in Scotland is doing is they keep funding this equity agenda. And I'm delighted about that. However, the reality of this work, is that it’s a very tough reality. And I've been so, you know, happy to hear that I'm not alone. You know, it's just over the past couple of days listening to guys here talking about their work. I think we have a lot in common in terms of the barriers that we're addressing.

And the reality of it is that communities, and I mentioned in my title slide, that communities are really critical for us because the communities that we work in determine so much around how much success we are able to have. And a lack of family mobility for our young people is a big, big deal for us. Many very young people don't leave their street that they grow up in. They don't leave their immediate communities. If there's a natural barrier, a big road, or a building, they tend to see that as their area and their patch, and they don't really want to go beyond it. So there's a kind of physical immobility that we try to work around. But also a kind of a mental, contextual immobility as well, about the big world out there. I had an idea a couple of years ago that I would love to pack up some of my kids and put them on a plane and take them somewhere else just to give them another experience and to show them the world. But it's just a big deal for us about not going anywhere beyond your immediate community. And, obviously, that can lead to a lack of knowledge about higher education and degrees and jobs that require degrees. Especially for the bulk of the kids that I work with who have no context around what higher education is because they would be the first in their family to go on to study at that level. And then obviously what that also leads to is a lack of preparedness for the entry qualifications that you need. And the reason why I wanted to show you that slide with all the As was just because that is the reality of what you need, more or less, to get into university in Scotland these days. You just need lots of As for everything all in one sitting. And many very young people just are not, they're not there.

>>Audience Member: And, yet, Bernadette, you do have that way which students can go into the VET sector, the vocational sector in order to get the pathway.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah.

>> Audience Member: So is that not recognised as a way of..?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: We are working really hard to get that recognised. Our schools' programme used to be, we changed its name because of that. It used to be called GOALS which was an acronym that stood for Greater Opportunity of Access in Learning with Schools. And we changed it in 2008 to FOCUSWest because we wanted a C in there that stood for college. Our college partners were not really being recognised. But also, the word college in the UK has a different esteem that it’s held within. We want to have the same esteem that college studies have with university. We have a big issue around parity of esteem. And the legislation that I referred to earlier was called the post 16 education act. And we are trying in the UK to talk about post 16 studies, rather than college and university. Because college is always

regarded as being lower down, and the kids tell us that, the teachers tell us that. They say, “Our kids won't go to college because they see that as being a failure.” You know, vocational education is being seen as being lower down. So we are very much trying to emphasise that pathway because we feel it's a really underused pathway. And also you need a different qualification profile to go to college. You need fewer qualifications and it’s a much more enabling route for many of our kids. It's just that it's not understood that well. And also, there are bigger issues as well with the articulation of some of the college programmes into the university programmes, where the articulation has not been worked out so well. So sometimes our students start at college, but then they find they can't progress. So there's still work that needs to happen at that level. But I absolutely take your point. It's a great route, and it's not that well used.

I'll just maybe quickly mention what my organisation is trying to do about that. I'm going to talk a little bit about partnership later. But we work in partnership, have six university partners, and they're all different. We work together to offer as much as we can to our young people. Whether they want to study creative degrees or technological degrees, other types of degrees. We are completely impartial.

So although I'm based out of Glasgow University, I don't work FOR Glasgow. I certainly don't do marketing for Glasgow as you can see with my slide there. We, I talked about immobility and social mobility. First, one of the firsts things we do is we get kids out of school and we get them on to campus to show them that they can be part of this, and to give them some feeling of ownership over a space within higher education. And we split that across colleges and universities so that they have a feeling for both.

We work, we spend a lot of time working on positive mindsets because so many of our young people just tell us that, you know, university is not for them. Nobody in their family went to university, and they've done perfectly well, thank you. So we work very hard to talk to them about how they're capable of a degree because the schools select them by telling us that they're capable of this. And we work with them to show them that all of this is within the possibilities for them in the future.

I was over in the States in South Carolina in February, and I met some guys from something called the Upward Bound Project, and they do exactly the same work on the same as us - positive mindset work which is quite powerful. We do specific academic enrichment programmes in school for kids at the senior years in Scotland. So S5, S6 means age 17, 16, 17, 18. So we do very specific programme called the top-up programme which can permit adjusted offers to university. So all those five As can become three As and two Bs. Or even two As and three Bs. And that can be enabled through our top-up programme. We also do specific preparation work for kids that are going on to do a specialist degree in something like the performing arts, music, or art and design, that type of thing. And so this is a summary of all of that.

And you can see from the bottom of the slide that we work in partnership with a whole range of diverse university partners. So Caledonian University here is a modern university so is UWS. Strathclyde is a technological university that specialised in things like engineering. The Royal Conservatoire, as you can tell by the name, does degrees in performance, in music, dance, that kind of thing. The Glasgow School of Art is very much around art and design, architecture. And then there's where I’m based, University of Glasgow, which offers professional degrees and general degrees in things like the humanities, in things like medicine, vet medicine, law. So a whole range of things that you can study there.

We work in partnership, and this slide is just meant to symbolise everything that's good in partnerships. But the reality for me of working in partnership is a bit more like this, the world of oil and water not mixing too well. And often we have tugs of war over finances, budgets, who gets what. And that's why I'm really glad to come here and speak to you guys and learn about, you know, how you can do partnerships properly and where you have MOUs in train, who will do what and you have proper agreements, and I will definitely take that back to Scotland and talk to my colleagues about that a little bit about how partnership working can work really well. Without lots of time being spent arguing around territory and who works with which group and all the rest of it.

I just, a few slides here on adjusted offers. This is something that's very unique to my programme. And we're really glad we have those because without those, we have so many people we just wouldn't get anywhere near university at all. And we have some data that we've been collecting now, longitudinal data, that shows that this top-up programme that we have that enables adjusted offers very much makes an impact. This data is specific to University of Glasgow, but we've pretty much doubled our numbers and so forth in terms of entrance coming through that top-up route to gain access to university.

These slides are already data heavy, so a little bit boring. I won't go through much detail here, but effectively, this first column is telling a story for us around how the top-up programme is impacting our retention. And, basically, the smaller the number there, the better it is for us in terms of measuring impact and retention. And that's now become a feature of the funding as well. So it's not enough that we are showing actual enrolment. So our funding is tied not just to kids' aspirations to university or applications or even their school attainment. It's actually tied to enrolment, so we've got to get them in. So we have a really, really tough measure. And not only have we got to get them in, we have to work with volume as well. So I work with about 8,000 young people per year. And I think if I worked with less, I probably would not get the funding that I get. So not only have I got to work with a large group, I need to get them in. And so… and the funding, as I said, is tied to retention. And so not only do they get in, we've got to hang on to them as well and they can't really drop out. On this slide is also showing some data in that first column, on summer school and the impact of summer school. So we often measure in combination with the top-up

programme also with summer school, those two factors together and working together. And the reference here is to the GOALS project which is our previous name.

This data also is telling a little bit of a story around measures that the universities have. So the university measures in Scotland for access are enshrined in something called outcome agreements. Their kind of agreements are a feature of the legislation that was brought in 2013. And these outcome agreements are all tied up around something called the SIMD. Which is the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. I think you have a similar measurement policy?

>> Paul Koshy: SEIFA.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yes, it’s the same thing. So, again, we've been able to show through using a control group of comparative schools that we have been having a discernible and measurable impact in terms of progression. And this data is localised to University of Glasgow, we base tracking of university around that. But, yeah, we have to collect that. And it's good to collect that anyway, but we have to collect that. It's just a feature of what we need to measure our success.

So I just wanted to flag some information to you. And another thing I just wanted to mention to you is just something more creative that we've been trying to bring in. And this is, in our programme, we decided a few years ago that all of our kids have been using technology. This is kind of, a refutable information these days about how teenagers are constantly on the Web and finding out all of their information online. We wanted to be able to connect better with our group, with our young people who basically were telling us if they couldn't find something out on their mobile phone within three clicks, that they just weren't going to find out. And so we were astonished, actually, as well, when we did our own little bit of research around where our kids are getting their information from - for everything - and it's just, I think it's just this train that we're on that's hurtling in one direction around the Internet and technology. But given the way our young people are accessing their information through social media and through these means, we asked government for some money to try and develop a source, a web resource that was going to be closer in terms of how it presented information to young people. So we got some money to create a dedicated web resource. It's called FOCUS Point. And I'd be really delighted if any of you had any time to go and have a look at it and maybe email me with your feedback and your thoughts on it.

We wanted to pull something together where we connect our kids also together and for many very young people, they are the only person in their school who are applying to university, and that's quite isolating. And so through this website, they're able to connect with other kids who are also the only ones applying to do maths at Glasgow Uni or engineering at Strathclyde, that kind of thing. And also, this gives a kind of a one-stop-shop of all the information, advice, and guidance that they need. We also, we're really keen to try and to make sure that we have lots of information in

there on subjects and courses and qualifications and college. That important college route that they often just forget about. So we wanted to bring that in and to do that. That was launched in November of 2014. So we're not, you know, we've not progressed too far since then. We did kind of a soft launch. But we have at least a couple of thousand kids who have now enrolled through that means and we would like to develop that a bit more. We want to get more material, put some of our programmes on there, and just try and use our digital resources a little bit better and be smarter. Because we know that funding is not always going to flow through from government to plan this work. And if we can try and just get our information out there, then we'd like to do that.

And so that is pretty much everything that I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to leave some time for some questions and discussion if there's opportunity for that. But thanks very much for listening to my presentation. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Professor Sue Trinidad: Questions for Bernadette? While I just load up the web page.

>> Audience Member: Do many of the universities offer most of their courses online for distance learners at all, is that something that can help people who are not mobile..?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: They’re talking about it. I was talking to Cathy (Cupitt) earlier about how when I talked about MOOCs, they presented me with lots of information - my Board - and they said this is a bad way to invest your resource because there's a high non-completion rate. And they were also saying that MOOCs are only really for advanced learners, people who know their way around the technology and all the rest of it. But I think that they've just not been looking for the right sources of information because I think a lot more can be done with that. And we know that we can't always afford to keep going out to some of our schools – some of our schools are in really isolated places. We've got some schools where we have to get on a plane just because we're crossing a stretch of water. We can't afford to keep doing that, you know, and if we could put some resources online, we would love to do that. And I think it would be another good route for us to be able to provide a bit more access to courses and information. But I have to say that we're so far behind just in terms of developed thinking, you know, in that area. And, yeah, so I don't know, I don't know if you're further ahead than we are… I'm sure you are.

>> Audience Member: We’re struggling with geographic isolation for different reasons to yours. We’ve still got a long way to go, as well.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah, yeah.

>> Audience Member: And in terms of bandwidth and all of those issues as well for people in remote communities…

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah.

>> Audience Member: … access issues.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah, yeah. No, I think much more can be done. And I think, you know, I mean, I have a three-year-old who can find her way around a tablet, no problem. You know, and I'm sure there are lots of things that could be developed. Or maybe this is something that we could develop together, I don't know. Something where we talk about plans for doing something where we could share something across Scotland and Australia, I don't know. Possibilities, yeah.

>> Professor Sue Trinidad: I’ve been to the STARS conference - actually a number of us here - and heard that lady [Marnie Hughes-Warrington, ANU] talking about how MOOCs are being used by the primary school kids now.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah, yeah.

>> Professor Sue Trinidad: And what's quite frightening is these kids are now moving into the secondary school and then into the university and they're so far advanced now because they've been doing their Chemistry MOOC and their Astronomy MOOC so on and all these university people are going, well, what are we going to do with these students? So they're the gifted ones, but yes, we’re looking at the other students at the other end of learning spectrum.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah, yeah.

>> Professor Sue Trinidad: We really have to work with.

>> Audience Member: Did I read correctly that the retention of undergrad students was fairly similar across the three or four different bands?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah, well we are showing that the students that come through our top-up programme, there are a couple of blips. So one in '05 and one in '07, but we were able to show that we had stronger retention with our particular cohort that come through our access route. Because we were being faced with un-evidenced, anecdotal information when we went to meetings about letting all these students in who can't get in through normal means. You know, I think a lot of people in access work here, why are you letting all these people in when we all have a fixed number of places? And also there's a whole lobby that comes from our private schools where they feel that their places that they are entitled to are being displaced. Because we are letting all these people in who really shouldn't be there. So we decided to track the particular students that we worked with that come through our programme and particularly this academic preparation programme top-up that gave the adjusted offers. And we were able to show that our particular group was being retained better compared to the norm. The numbers are small in terms of a difference, but they're still visible. So that was pretty much what I was wanting to show in the slide.

>> Audience Member: We have a similar programme, Step Up to Curtin, [inaudible] with the ATAR, between 60 and 70 [inaudible], and similarly, we had to back those students and argue quite strongly that, really, they’re doing just as well.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah.

>> Audience Member: As other students coming through direct entry.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah.

>> Audience Member: But I was surprised to hear that part of your KPIs are around the retention space.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah.

>> Audience Member: Because our universities all have different retention strategies.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah.

>> Audience Member: And the amount of funds will focus what they have on that.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah.

>> Audience Member: So how do you influence..?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: That's one of the hardest.

>> Audience Member: …strategies.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah, that's one of the hardest things of all because it means that the universities themselves have to put systems in place that are looking after these groups of students. They have to identify them when they arrive. And they have to really support them. And the universities are all at different stages or at least in my region, the West of Scotland, they're in different places in terms of how well they're doing that.

University of Glasgow has only just really wakened up to the fact that it needs to put in something additional to support this particular group who often feel that they're different right away. When they first arrive, it's “freshers’ week”. Everyone around them is a kind of different type of student, you know, and there's a lot of chatter around the kind of schools they went to which are mostly independent schools. The way the students I work with speak, a lot of them lack confidence. They're just not used to making eye contact, you know. And this is part of the work that we do when we go out and work with them, especially with the boys who just often just generally tend to mature a little bit later. And we've had some hilarious sessions where we've talked to them about eye contact, and then they go about all day staring at us [laughter], you know. You know, because they're practising making eye contact.

But they know right away as soon as they register that they've just had a whole different school experience. And they really question, especially when they have that first essay that needs to be handed in six weeks into the first semester, and things get tough. And we know we've tracked them, we know that they had almost a kind of crack up point which is measurable, almost. And so the universities are beginning to waken up to this. They know they need to do something. But, you know, they're all engaged at a different level. Some of them really try, some of them think, well, they can sink or swim a little bit. The legislation has helped a little bit around that. You know, I said I didn't really have much in the way of having a bite, you know, that legislation, but it's changing behaviour. And I think that's why I'm thankful that we have had small incremental changes because it’s slow, I think, is it you, Cathy? I was talking about how this work is, just it takes a long time to do, you know, and you're changing cultures, not just schools and communities. But you're trying to change big, old cultures like, cultures that been around since 1451. That's what I have to remind myself when I have a bad day, you know. That, hey, this culture has been around since 1451.

But, yeah, this is a tough measure. I mean, our measures in Scotland are all really tough. And, you know, when I first came into this work, the measures were much softer, you know. But everything just has been tightening up and getting harder. Just we're still in times of austerity and all money and [inaudible] more than anything with the reporting. We just have to justify every pound that we acquire. And it just means that we have to talk to lots more people, but that's not a bad thing, you know. In the past, you know, we didn't have to work quite so hard with our internal partners to make them do stuff that was changing their behaviour. But now we have to do that. So there's no avoiding these tough discussions that we have to have. And some of it is not welcome, you know. I've had some horrible discussions with people who, you know, who just, I think, resent what they think of as social engineering. And don't really want diverse campuses. But I think, again, it's just part of that campaign and very much see this work as very much still in the realm of being a campaign where we're actually trying to change and influence behaviour.

>> Professor John Phillimore: Bernadette, that was very interesting. Just… one question is about, I mean, we’re talking about the Scottish system, the free system, is pretty much predicated on [inaudible] is that right? It’s a zero sum game? The middle class who want their kids to go to university and has got good marks at school are being crowded out by your programme because it’s zero sum? Is that..? Or do they then have to [inaudible] university – are the quotas on institutions or courses or ..? I mean, top up gets a hundred students and here [inaudible] gets the rest? How does it work?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: It's a standoff at the moment because the private schools are going crazy. The private schools are going crazy because the parents of the young people who attend private schools. And in Edinburgh, for example, we have a lot of independent, private, secondary schools.

>> Professor John Phillimore: All the sons and daughters of public servants [inaudible].

>> Bernadette Sanderson: They feel entitled to a place at university. And they feel also that that fixed number of places for Scottish students is being crowded out by access.

>> Professor John Phillimore: So who fixes the number? Is that the Scottish Department of Education or the Scottish Government?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Scottish government is controlling of those fixed numbers. So they determine every year how many, what the numbers for education, how many teachers will be trained, how many doctors. And those numbers just seem to be evermore constrained and compressed. So, for example, at Glasgow University, the first year intake for dentists next year will be 87. So there are 87 spots for the whole first year, and that's everyone, that's everybody. So there are further layers of control over access. So I mentioned the five As for your higher exams that you need. That's not the only criterion of entry for medicine at Glasgow. You then have sit the UK clinical aptitude test. And you don't just have to pass if, you've got to get a high enough threshold score because the people who are interviewed for a place - so there's a further interview - you can only be interviewed once you get above a certain threshold. So it's a really difficult context within which to do this work. And the universities have also been given quotas. So they have to have so many students who come from these poorer backgrounds. So what they seem to be doing at the moment is they are all fighting over the best and the brightest students that come from areas like Castlemilk and [inaudible]. Which are communities that I work in. They don't want to work with the mass, they want to work, they say to me, who is on track to get all the As? Give me them, you know. And I say that's not really widening access, you know, that's just hot housing.

[ Inaudible ]

>> Bernadette Sanderson: So we have a kind of, I said a standoff, but it's kind of, that's where we're at in terms of where the policy landscape has brought us to.

>> Professor John Phillimore: So it’s up to, effectively, basically it’s a bureaucratic position on the numbers, effectively, as opposed… so [ Inaudible ] … it’s not expanding all that much, is that what you’re saying?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: No. Not really.

>> Professor John Phillimore: Okay. And can I just ask one last one – do you think all of those programmes you have, like the strategies, the campus visits, the top up scores, and, I don’t know, maybe you have scholarships as well, um, do you try and evaluate individually as opposed to just the straight retention?

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's controversial because we have a partnership, I mentioned partnership. Some of these parts of that whole are better than others in terms of the individual evaluation. So our top-up programme is a sweet programme because it gets the kids in. And it's very easy to measure.

>> Professor John Phillimore: And relatively cheap in some respects, right.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't cost too much, yep. And it's academic so we can measure, we have a moderator who second marks all the work. We've got tangible examples. Other things, the campus visits actually are not too difficult to evaluate. But our programme for access to college, that's harder to measure. So we have less evidence about what works there because that's delivered by [inaudible] specific universities. Then that affects the partnership because they feel that their work is not being evaluated so positively. But it's why we collect data on everything. We measure everything that can be measured. We measure numbers, we measure, we survey, we collect information on absolutely everything that we can collect. And we need it because, as I say, the funding keeps becoming tougher to acquire. But, yeah, the context is difficult at the moment. And we just keep, we keep pushing on, you know, because there's nothing else we can do. We have to just keep pushing on against this system that we have. And keep everyone on board. I think that's important for us that we just are talking the same language as our partners. But I think you've, I think you're a bit farther ahead compared to us.

>> Professor Sue Trinidad: I think we've just got a nicer country [laughter]. A lot of Scottish are here! The good people came over to Australia. [laughter] We’ve got another question, I think,

>> Audience member: Thanks, Bernadette, that was really interesting. I mean, I'm interested - now, and once you've got them in, do the universities provide additional support for this group of students? Or are they expected to just sink or swim? You know, you're on your own. We've got you in, it's unto you.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: They are supposed to, and you're absolutely right. Some of the universities are newer universities, and have a really good culture of student support because two of our universities, Caledonian and West of Scotland University, they became universities in 1992. Before that, they were polytechnics. They were, they had a long history of being enabling institutions. They were non-selecting when they were polytechnics. So they were called recruiting universities when they became universities. Which meant they had to work quite hard to populate their courses. Which meant they were more naturally supporting their students and wanting to hang on to their students. So they have really good systems in place of looking after people and making sure student support was in place.

Our older universities were always deemed to be non-recruiting institutions. So “selecting”. So the kind of institutions that could say, “we'll have you but not you.” Or,

“you're not good enough, but maybe you could be.” Those campuses have had to do more in very recent times to be more supportive of access students. And I think they are at different stages. I'm being diplomatic here, you can imagine, by the way I'm saying it. They've certainly got far more to do, I would say, in terms of providing these supports or even understanding what the issues are if you come from a different social context, and the kind of barriers that you may have to deal with in your personal life. The kind of family stuff that you might be having to overcome. The kind of bursaries you might need, the kind of financial access that you might want to tap into. And this is all new for some of our partners. They're only beginning to realise what the problems are. And they're always starting something not to dismiss some of these things as being valid reasons for not being able to continue in your studies. I think it helps having more access practitioners on these types of campuses. Because then they're able to talk to them about what the barriers actually are. But, you know, one or two of our partners there are, you know, they have just such old histories. And a very particular social class of person who has traditionally always studied there. And I've heard some really interesting things said about the student body or what isn't fair to be norms for the student body, but that has to change. You know, and as we bring in more, you know, you saw from our graph, you know, we've got a big, upward curve there of the kind of numbers that are coming in. And so that is changing the context of the campus. You talked about creating a critical mass of people that will then go on, and that's slow, but it's starting to change the fabric of how the kinds of person that inhabits that kind of campus. And, of course, the great acid test for us will be whether these students not just become undergrads, but actually become post grads, you know. That's why I would love to have some PhD students in access, you know, who can then go on and maybe become staff at these kinds of institutions. And that really change the whole kind of multidimensional sort of culture. But, yeah, we still have loads of work to do, so.

>> Professor Sue Trinidad: Okay, well I'm aware of the time. And all of this is recorded and will be up online for anybody who wants to refer to it. And all of the details will be available. But thank you very much.

>> Bernadette Sanderson: Thank you very much.

[ Applause ]