Scottish toolkit for fair access: Interim report

This interim report provides a detailed methodology for the development of the Scottish Toolkit for Fair Access. It builds on and develops the method proposed in our response to the invitation to tender. The Fair Access Toolkit has two broad aims: - To provide an accessible summary of the evidence of impact for different interventions to allow practitioners and funders to select those that are most appropriate given their budget and target audience. - To provide guidance on selecting and implementing evaluation methods for practitioners to support the improved evaluation of widening access initiatives across Scotland. Our work will focus on the first aim as the necessary initial step to developing the Toolkit. We propose to initially consider interventions that relate to retention, progression and success, as topics where the Toolkit can most add value. In particular we will consider evidence in relation to the following activities: - Mentoring - Bursaries / scholarships - Attainment support - International opportunities - Employability guidance - Internships We will prioritise evaluations which test the activities with socio-economically disadvantaged learners and those with one of the nine protected characteristics. If a focus on these target groups alone does not identify sufficient material, we will widen the search to include evaluations of interventions that support all students. We will take a rapid evidence assessment (REA) approach to searching, identifying and assessing the evidence. Proposed search terms are included in Appendix 1. To assess and compare impact across different interventions we will calculate effect sizes and classify studies as having no, low, moderate, high or very high impact. We will aggregate all of the assessments to provide an overall assessment for each intervention.