- This blog was kindly authored by Dr Anna Anthony, director of HEAT. HEAT provides a collaborative data service enabling higher education providers, Uni Connect partnerships and Third Sector Organisations to show the impact of their equality of opportunity delivery through a shared, standardised data system. By aggregating data from across the membership, HEAT can publish national-level impact reports for the sector.
It has never been more important for providers across the sector to show that access and participation activities have an impact. With resources stretched, we need to know the work we are doing is making a measurable difference. New research from HEAT reveals a series of powerful findings:
- Intensive outreach boosts HE entry by up to 29% – Students who received at least 11 hours of intensive outreach were up to 29% more likely to enter higher education (HE) than matched peers receiving minimal support.
- Disadvantaged students see the biggest gains – Free school meal (FSM) eligible students were up to 48% more likely to progress to HE when engaged in intensive outreach.
- Uni Connect makes a difference – The largest relative increases in HE entry were observed in FSM-eligible students who participated in Uni Connect-funded activities, further demonstrating the importance of impartial outreach delivered collaboratively.
- Access to selective universities improves – Intensive outreach from high-tariff providers increased the chance of progressing to a high-tariff university by 19%.
- Sustained support across Key Stages is vital – Outreach delivered across both Key Stages 4 and 5 had the greatest impact, highlighting the need for long-term, multi-stage interventions throughout secondary education.
These findings provide compelling evidence that the work being done across the sector to widen participation is not only reaching the right students but changing trajectories at scale. Crucially, this latest research includes previously unavailable controls for student-level prior attainment — adding new rigour to our understanding of outreach impact. You can read the full report on our website.
What’s next for national-level research?
Our ability to generate this kind of national evidence is set to improve even further thanks a successful bid to the Office for Students (OfS) Innovation Fund. Through a collaboration with academics at the Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO) at the UCL Institute of Education, HEAT will lead on the development and piloting of a pioneering new Outreach Metric, measuring providers’ broader contribution to reducing socio-economic gaps in HE participation. More details about this project can be found here, and we look forward to sharing early findings with the sector in 2026.
Local-level evaluation is just as important
While national analyses like these are essential to understanding the big picture, the OfS rightly continues to require providers to evaluate their own delivery. Local evaluations are critical for testing specific interventions, understanding how programmes work in different contexts, and learning how to adapt practice to improve outcomes. Yet robust evaluation is often resource-intensive and can be out of reach for smaller teams.
This is where use of a sector-wide system for evaluation helps – shared systems like HEAT provide the infrastructure to track student engagement and outcomes at a fraction of the cost of building bespoke systems. Thanks to a decade of collaboration, we now have a system which the sector designed and built together, and which provides the tools necessary to deliver the evaluation that the OfS require providers to publish as part of their Access and Participation Plans (APP).
We’re also continuing to improve our infrastructure. Thanks to a second successful bid to the OfS Innovation Fund we are building system functionality to support providers to use their tracking data when evaluating their APP interventions. This includes an ‘automated comparator group tool’ that will streamline the process of identifying matched participant and non-participant groups based on confounding variables. By reducing the need for manual data work, the tool will make it easier to apply quasi-experimental designs and generate more robust evidence of impact.
Next steps – sharing through publication
With all these tools at their disposal, the next step is to support the sector to publish their evaluation. We need shared learning to avoid duplication and siloed working. HEAT is currently collaborating with TASO to deliver the Higher Education Evaluation Library (HEEL), which will collect, and share, intervention-level evaluation reports in one accessible place for the first time. By collating this evidence, the HEEL will help practitioners and policymakers alike to see what works, what doesn’t, and where we can improve together.
If we want to continue delivering meaningful progress on access and participation, we need both meaningful, critical local evaluation and powerful national insights. Centralised data tracking infrastructure can give the sector the tools it needs to do both.