The Access and Outreach team of the University of York works to ensure that the university is available to all students no matter their background. 

They run a programme called ‘Shine’ that aims to engage with high achieving pre-16 year old students from backgrounds that are currently under-represented in higher education. Ultimately, ‘Shine’ aims to raise these students’ awareness and knowledge of higher education, while motivating them to realise their potential and make informed decisions about their future. 

The Shine team partnered with ImpactEd Evaluation to build evaluation knowledge and capacity within their team. As part of this, ImpactEd Evaluation ran an interactive workshop with the Shine team to develop a Theory of Change, which highlighted the overall aim and key desired outcomes of the programme. Following this, ImpactEd Evaluation created an evaluation framework, which:

• Identified tools to reliably measure the impact of the Shine programme
• Outlined the rhythms and timelines for running the evaluation
• Provided in-depth guidance on conducting a robust and insightful evaluation. 

Putting evaluation in their hands

The Shine team is now independently running the evaluation in-house. However, our partnership has not ended here. ImpactEd Evaluation is working with the Access and Outreach team again to run a second capacity building activity with a sister programme, ‘YorJourney’, which works with post-16 year old students in unlocking their contextual offers for the University of York or Hull York Medical School. This work is drawing on and extending on the learning the University of York team have gone through in the first part of the partnership.

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