Assignment - Alice Davis 20/03/12

Alice Davis 20/03/12
Today’s guest speaker was Alice Davis who is the senior Member of South West Wales Reaching Wider Consortium. She gave us a lecture on widening Access in Wales and how it then works; a basic outline of widening access is where you would increase opportunities for individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds to benefit their higher education. Their aims are to increase the amount of people from ‘under – represented’ that attend higher education institutions, the sorts of people this would be aimed at would be people from black or ethnic minority communities, disabilities, low income families and communities First wards. The Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (2000) focus on income, health, education, employment, housing and access to service, the HEFCW found that because of all their improvements there was a 10% rise in the proportion of Welsh domiciled students studying a higher education course in all further education institutes. There were also a number of HEFCW Widening Access Funding ideas introduced these included the Fee Planning, WA Premium which is an annual teaching grant given to higher education institutes so that they recognise toe extra costs that may occur when recruiting students who may be from under-represented groups. Another idea is the WA Strategy Funding, Higher education Funding Council of Wales (HEFCW) (2012) state:

‘We also encourage higher education (HE) institutions to plan their widening access activities by producing three-year widening access strategies. These include plans for supporting disabled students. We operate a Widening Access Fund to support the strategies and HEIs report on progress to us annually.’

They also came up with the idea of reaching wider, this was established in 2002 by the HEFCW it was introduced so as to break down the barriers that arise when trying to receive an education and tries to widen the access to learning. Their aims were to support the economic up-skilling and to support the idea of social inclusion regardless of class or skills. All four of these would have assist the well-being of students wishing to continue into further education, it would allow them to improve their education further without the worry of money problems if they are from a deprived background, it would also help students with disabilities who may have had difficulty attending university without the HEFCWs backing.

The community’s First wards introduced the Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation (2000) to look after young people who may be disabled, studying through the medium of Welsh or from black or ethnic minority communities. The communities First Ward was introduced because the Welsh Assembly were concerned at the number of Welsh communities that were suffering from stagnation and lack of investment. After much research they came to understand that there was Child Poverty throughout Wales and they wanted to overcome this. Their aims then became to assist when enhancing achievements, focus on underrepresented communities, work to encourage progression to higher education and finally to improve severe social disadvantages throughout Wales. To improve the amount of children attending school and going onto higher education within schools they introduced a number of changes to improve their learning within schools. Year 9 pupils are now provided with mentoring if needed and can take part within Saturday clubs, techno camps and ACE days all these are introduced to increase educational standards for pupils and also to ensure that they start deciding on what they want to do in the future. The same thing was done for the reaming years, however each year was provided with different activities, such as year 11’s being spoken to about college or finding jobs and year 13’s being spoken to about the idea of university or jobs.

Reference
Higher Education Funding Council of Wales (2011) Funding and Initiatives Retrieved 18th April 2012 from http://www.hefcw.ac.uk/policy_areas/widening_access/funding_initiatives_wa.aspx