Uni Connect: Guidance on priorities

Targeted outreach

Uni Connect provides sustained and progressive targeted higher education outreach to young people in Years 11 to 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 2023-24 is focused on learners in Years 11 to 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.

997 target areas have been identified, 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, partnerships 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 Uni Connect partnerships to:

• provide impartial, sustained and progressive targeted outreach to young people who live, or lived, in the target areas and are in Years 11 to 13
• situate their interventions within a sustained and progressive programme of activity and engagement over time and detail this in a written progression framework that sets out the specific changes expected for an individual learner over time as a result of the activities undertaken through Uni Connect
• seek to maximise engagement with learners who live in target areas
• continue to deliver in all the target areas they have been allocated, if possible, using their judgement to limit the areas they work in if this secures best use of the funding that is available. If so, they should be prepared to explain the rationale for their decisions
• give an increased focus to target learners in Years 12 and 13 in further education colleges given the different aspirations of learners in these settings.

Partnerships can use their targeted outreach allocation to support attainment-raising activity with eligible learners. If delivered this 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'.