Uni Connect: Guidance on priorities

Targeted outreach

Uni Connect provides sustained and progressive targeted higher education outreach to young people in years 12 and 13 living in areas where the proportion of young people entering higher education is low and lower than might be expected given their educational attainment.

Who is eligible?

Targeted outreach for 2024-25 is focused on learners in years 12 and 13 who live in particular geographic areas.

Uni Connect uses research on areas with an unexplained gap in participation to determine where investment can be targeted to boost the numbers of young people from these areas going into higher education.

We have identified 997 target areas, which have:

• low levels of young participation (POLAR3 quintile 1) and lower than expected levels of young participation, considering Key Stage 4 attainment and ethnicity (quintile 1 or quintile 2), or
• low levels of young participation (POLAR3 quintile 1) and lower than expected levels of young participation, considering Key Stage 4 attainment only (quintile 1 or quintile 2).

Read more about how we measure young participation in higher education

In terms of upper age limit, you can work with learners who turn 19 during year 13, but not with learners who turn 20 during year 13.

What are our expectations of partnerships?

We expect you to:

• provide impartial, sustained and progressive targeted outreach to young people who live, or lived, in the target areas and are in years 12 and 13
• situate your interventions within a sustained and progressive programme of activity and engagement over time, which should be aligned to a progression framework that sets out the specific changes expected for an individual learner over time as a result of the interventions
• seek to only engage learners who live in target areas in years 12 and 13 and who have already been engaged in targeted outreach
• give an increased focus to target learners in years 12 and 13 in further education colleges given the different ambitions of learners in these settings.

You can use your targeted outreach allocation to support attainment raising activity with eligible learners. Any such activity should form part of a sustained and progressive framework of higher education outreach.

What do we hope to achieve?

Targeted outreach aims to help recipients make well-informed decisions about their future education and to reduce gaps in higher education participation for the least represented groups.

By undertaking this work partnerships help to mitigate against risk 2 on the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register: 'students may not have equal opportunity to receive the information and guidance that will enable them to develop ambition and expectations, or to make informed choice about their higher education options'.

Targeted outreach also helps with learner confidence and their perceptions of higher education. This helps to mitigate against risk 3 on the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register: 'students may not feel able to apply to higher education, or certain types of providers within higher education, despite being qualified'.