All Cambridge Admissions Office courses

Undermatch research and implications for supporting competitive applications seminar by Causeway Education for outreach staff from across the university who can benefit from free professional development to improve their practice.

Representatives from the Communications Office Social Media team will take you through how to best use social media to communicate with potential applicants, schools and students. This session will suit College, Faculty and Department outreach or communications staff, whether you currently have a social media account or are looking to set one up.

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 the role of stakeholder analysis in programme/intervention design, evaluation planning, and reporting. It will also look at ways to undertake stakeholder analysis and stakeholder management. The session will comprise of practical guidance and opportunities for interaction.

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.

The Working with Student Ambassadors Session will be led by the Cambassador team at the Cambridge Admissions Office, and cover the steps involved in recruiting, training and using student ambassadors for events such as open days and masterclasses. This briefing will be suitable for Faculty, Department or College staff who may wish to set up their own ambassador scheme, or who wish to improve ad-hoc events which require student volunteers.

WP Groups and Criteria - What do all the acronyms mean?

Don’t know your POLAR from your TUNDRA? Is FSM the same as PP? Are all students with disabilities considered SEN?

This session aims to demystify the wonderful world of widening participation terms and provide an overview of different groups which may be considered ‘WP’. Using the WP Selection Criteria paper (enrolment key: WP@CAM) as a basis, we will define each term/group and discuss the research behind whether they are underrepresented in higher education or face educational disadvantage, as well as any considerations or shortcomings in some of the criteria. At the end, we will talk through how the priority criteria was constructed.

This introductory session would be suitable for anyone with an interest in widening participation, including both practitioners, managers and senior leads, and will be of particular use for newer staff in this area.

Note: this session has a follow up session which will focus on the more practical side of implementing the WP Selection Criteria.

This training will be held via Zoom, the details of which will be circulated before the session.

Cambridge Admissions Office has 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.

Aimed at all outreach practitioners at the University of Cambridge, this briefing will provide an overview of the recently revised WP Participant Targeting/Selection criteria for use on outreach initiatives. The authors of the paper will explain the rationale behind the paper's revised weighting of WP measures and some of the research underpinning the paper. There will also be some discussion on why targeting/selection is important as opposed to using first come/first serve or relying exclusively on teacher nominations.

This session is accompanied by a skills-based session in April aimed at those with less experience implementing targeting/selection criteria.

Cambridge Admissions Office has 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.

Aimed at outreach practitioners with less experience using targeting/selection on their outreach programmes, this skills-based session will provide examples of good practice implementing targeting/selection drawn from experience running CAO programmes. The session will also explore ways to use other data sources and HEAT to make the process easier.

This session follows on from a briefing delivered in March explaining the new targeting/selection criteria adopted by the Collegiate University.

“Help, my WP programme is so popular I have 10,000 students for only 10 spaces, what do I do?” We’ve all been there, but whether you have an incredibly oversubscribed programme or just want to make sure your programme is working with the right people, this training is for you.

In this session we will go through the University’s agreed upon WP Selection Criteria and discuss how practitioners can implement this in their own activities. We will start by looking briefly at targeting and the tools available to help outreach practitioners target their programme to the right people. We will talk about selection: what types of programmes this type of selection criteria is most suitable for, run through some practical considerations in applying the criteria and suggest some methods for easily sorting your data to help with selections.

This session assumes you have either read the WP Selection Criteria paper (enrolment key: WP@CAM) for background, or have attended the previous WP Groups and Criteria training session.

This training will be held via Zoom, the details of which will be circulated before the session.

This online session will explore how to clarify and use outcomes in a way that supports programme/intervention design, and helps support comprehensive impact evaluation. The session will comprise of practical guidance, interactive activities, and examples of practice.