All Cambridge Admissions Office courses

Tom Levinson, Head of Widening Participation and Regional Collaboration, will discuss the new Access and Participation Plan agreed between the University of Cambridge and the government regulator, the Office for Students. This briefing will cover the contents of the plan and discuss the new targets agreed with the OfS, as well as the impact they may have on outreach and widening participation activity.

VENUE CHANGE: Due to a clash, the venue for this event has changed and is now to be held in the New Wing Seminar room in the SSC.

PLEASE NOTE: if you wish to join this session remotely, please say so in the special requirements section of your booking so we can manage numbers in the room and ensure we send you a Teams link.

This is an opportunity for staff supporting students with their transition to undergraduate study to share good practice and useful findings from their experiences working with Cambridge students. There will be showcases by speakers working with current students with an opportunity for Q&A, as well as time for networking and building connections with colleagues across the Collegiate University.

Any colleagues interested in contributing a short (ten minutes max) presentation to the showcase would be very welcome to do so and should email apevaluation@admin.cam.ac.uk in the first instance.

NOTE: if you wish to join this briefing remotely, please state this in the special requirements section of your booking (so we can manage expected numbers in the room).

A series of briefings from the ADS Research Unit taking you through a recent research paper they have produced examining admissions and widening participation at the University of Cambridge.

This session from Alexa Horner will provide an overview of her 2022 research exploring whether differentially lower offers (aka contextual admissions) might be justified at the University of Cambridge for applicants from certain under-represented and disadvantaged backgrounds.

This session will be recorded and made available afterwards for those who can’t attend.

Please note that this is for Schools Liaison Officers only. This session offers training to enable Schools Liaison Officers to deliver CPD training in schools and colleges to help teachers support student’s progression to leading universities.

This session is aimed at colleagues across the collegiate University who work with prospective students through admissions and outreach activity. In this session, the Director of Admissions, Sam Lucy will run through some of the common but trickier questions and how to answer them well.

We’re keen to include as many of the questions you find challenging as possible. Please add any questions you would like included here, or send via email to departmentliaison@admin.cam.ac.uk.

This session will be held via Zoom, the details of which will be circulated before the event. The session will also be recorded.

This is a session aimed at outreach staff, working with school-aged young people. We will be learning and practising strategies for managing low-level disruption, based on ‘Teach Like A Champion’. We will also discuss the importance of behaviour management for effective delivery, and how to know when behaviour management is your responsibility, or the school’s.

Cambridge Admissions Office have organised a series of briefing sessions in the coming weeks aimed at Schools Liaison Officers, Faculty/Department Outreach Staff, and any academics and staff members who will communicate with potential students.

This session will be useful to anybody who delivers academic workshops, particularly to young people at an outreach related event, though the skills developed will also help to improve general presentation and teaching skills. It will be delivered by The Brilliant Club (https://thebrilliantclub.org/)

The course will be split into three main sessions:

• Working with Pre-Undergraduate Students -including understanding of disadvantage in the school, overview of WP (widening participation), managing behaviour and creating a positive environment.
• Designing Engaging and Interactive Sessions
• Turning your Research into a Taster Lecture or Course for School Pupils

The session will help participants to consider the various audiences that they might deliver to in their roles, with a focus on those in a widening participation context. It will explore ways to engage those audiences and how to embed interactivity and higher order thinking skills into sessions delivered in person and virtually.

The course will be run via Zoom and these details will be circulated to registered participants.

NOTE: if you'd like to join the session remotely, please let us know in the Special Requirements section when booking. This will help us plan the session and manage physical numbers in the room.

This hybrid session, delivered online and in person, will outline and explain a simple 6-step process for designing and embedding evaluation for Access & Participation interventions and programmes. The process has been developed by the Cambridge Admissions Office and is flexible enough to be applied to many A&P interventions, regardless of the student lifecycle stage in question.

This online session will explore ethical considerations and principles within evaluation and how to ensure ethical practice in your evaluation. The session will comprise of practical guidance and the opportunity to work through real ethics scenarios relating to evaluation within a group.

This online session will explore why and how interviews can be a valuable method in the evaluation of access and participation, outreach and public engagement activities/interventions.

NB: if you would like to join this session remotely, please let us know in the special requirements of your booking and we can send you a Microsoft Teams link.

Surveys are a very common data collection method in Access & Participation evaluation. This session will review why they are so ubiquitous, their strengths and some common pitfalls to look out for. Great if you're new to survey design or want to refresh yourself on this method, we'll be going over some examples from recent programmes' evaluation and sharing good practice in design, collection, and analysis.

The series aims to help outreach practitioners at the University develop Evaluation Plans for their current projects and embed evaluation into the development of any future outreach activity.

To get the full benefit from the series, participants are expected to attend all three workshops. We understand that for practitioners this may be difficult due to workload, so we have allowed the option to sign up and indicate if you are unlikely to make one or more of the sessions. If you are unable to attend a session the expectation would be that you read up on the content before the subsequent session and complete any tasks.

Cambridge Foundation Year – Admissions and Outreach Briefing 2021

The Cambridge Foundation Year is a new opportunity that offers a stepping stone to Cambridge for those who have experienced educational disadvantage. This innovative route is designed for a new field of candidates to help them realise their academic potential through a full-time, residential programme fully embedded in the Collegiate University. It is a fully-funded opportunity so comes at no cost to students.

This high-profile initiative for the University will launch on 13th January 2021 with the first students expected to begin their studies in Michaelmas Term 2022. This session will let you know how you can best respond to any enquiries you might get from prospective applicants or advisors in this coming year.

The session will be of interest to anyone working in widening participation or outreach, but particularly those most typically dealing with enquiries. For more information contact please contact: foundation.year@admin.cam.ac.uk.

This session will be held on Zoom and a Zoom link will be circulated to those registered on the event.

The Cambridge Admissions Office HEAT Team will organise termly HEAT User Group Meetings. The aim of these meetings is to inform users of HEAT updates and raise any common issues to the group. There will also be time for any questions and/or feedback.

These meetings are primarily aimed at Operational Leads, however if these representatives are unable to attend the proposed dates, other HEAT users are more than welcome to come along. We hope to see as many of you attend these meetings as possible in order to make them as beneficial as we can.

These sessions are aimed at those who are brand new to HEAT (Higher Education Access Tracker) and who will want to be added to the live database as their institution’s Operational Lead or User. 

If you are only going to need Read Only or Read Only with Export permissions this training is not required.

This introductory session will explore what qualitative data analysis can tell you and the implications of different kinds of qualitative data collection.

A training session for people working in access & participation who wish to develop a better understanding of the stats techniques and numbers that you may encounter when evaluating programmes.

We'll be covering the basics, including descriptive statistics and some inferential statistics techniques. We'll also have a worked example from Rebecca Middleton at NEACO on analysing survey data. All welcome, be great to see you there (albeit on Teams).

These sessions are aimed at those who are brand new to HEAT (Higher Education Access Tracker) and who will want to be added to the live database as their institution’s Operational Lead or User with all Reports. 

If you are only going to need Read Only or Read Only with Export permissions this training is not required.

Cambridge Admissions Office have organised a series of briefing sessions in the coming weeks aimed at Schools Liaison Officers, Faculty/Department Outreach Staff, and any academics and staff members who will communicate with potential students.

This will be an informative session detailing examples of good practice in monitoring and evaluation, specifically related to outreach projects including those funded by the Widening Participation Project Fund. The session will cover general good practice in monitoring and evaluation, as well as featuring presentations from previous outreach projects detailing specific examples of monitoring and evaluation in practice.

Behaviour management training for outreach staff delivered by the Cambridge Admissions Office.

This training focuses on managing the needs and behaviour of both the group you and individual pupils. It will provide you with techniques and strategies you can use when delivering sessions to students. In this session, you’ll explore how your own behaviour influences your students’, and learn how to control your emotional responses when you’re interacting in the classroom. You’ll discover the latest techniques in classroom management and develop your capability to achieve consistency.

The training will take place in A329 - Counselling Service (Student Services Centre).

NOTE: if you'd like to join the session remotely, please let us know in the Special Requirements section when booking. This will help us plan the session and manage physical numbers in the room.

This hybrid session, delivered online and in person, will explore how to present and disseminate evaluation findings in appropriate ways for intended users, and to support wider strategic use.

This online session will address how to scope the requirements and boundaries of your evaluation in terms of purposes, questions and scaling. It will particularly explore how evaluation could be used constructively and strategically, and five potential areas that you could explore in your evaluation. This is the second step in the 6-Step Evaluation Process. The session will comprise of practical guidance, opportunities for discussion, and introduce some practical resources you can use in your own evaluation planning.

Cambridge Admissions Office have organised a series of briefing sessions in the coming weeks aimed at Schools Liaison Officers, Department Outreach Staff, and any academics and staff members who will communicate with potential students.

This session is aimed at outreach professionals and those who frequently speak to prospective students at Open Days or similar events, who would like to increase their knowledge of the services offered to students across the University. Representatives from CUSU, the Disability Resource Centre, the Counselling Service and the Careers Service, will discuss the services they offer students.

NOTE: if you'd like to join the session remotely, please let us know in the Special Requirements section when booking. This will help us plan the session and manage physical numbers in the room.

This hybrid session, delivered online and in person, will cover the basics of an underpinning Theory of Change for access & participation interventions.