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How staff can get involved with Access and Participation

Details of how staff at the University can help us to achieve our aims for Widening Access and Participation.

Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice allow colleagues from across the University to come together on matters of mutual interest. We have three communities of practice associated with our access and participation work.


Bath Outreach Network - for those across the University who are involved in outreach to share experiences and resources, and to get advice and support.

Equity in Education Research Network - bringing together researchers and practitioners from across the University who are working on equity related topics. The group meets to discuss issues, to share our research projects and plans, and allow communication between WP researchers and the WP practitioner teams at the University.

School Governor Network - for anyone who volunteers as a school governor (or similar role in a school), or is interested in becoming a school governor to share experiences, advice and support.

All members of the University are welcome to join any of the three networks that you find relevant. Please follow the links to find out more and join.

Widening Access


Access is one of the largest challenges highlighted in the Access and Participation Plan. The Widening Access team provide targeted outreach programmes, and build relationships with schools and teachers to help encourage students from under-represented groups to apply to the University of Bath.
You can be involved with some of the outreach activities already being delivered, and the Widening Access team are keen to support others to undertake outreach. To get involved, please join the Bath Outreach Network (see above).

Access work can also be supported by departments taking a strategic approach to school outreach. This page has a self-assessment tool for departments to reflect on their outreach along with a spreadsheet for recording outreach as a department and a guide for individual to record outreach on Pure.

3 students smiling looking at a book

Closing degree awarding gaps


Widening Participation does not end once students arrive at University. Degree awarding gaps exist between certain groups of students across the University. The Centre for Learning and Teaching have produced an overview of the challenges and some of the research of how we can address these persistent gaps. Within the Access and Participation Plan we have targets to reduce the awarding gaps for certain groups.

a large group of people at a lecture

Understanding degree awarding gaps

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Analysis of data across the University shows there are awarding gaps for some groups of students. An overview of the gaps is presented in the Access and Participation Plan at an institutional level. To understand them more fully in your department you may want to consider looking at data available on the wiki.

Teaching and Learning

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Considering the role of learning and teaching in student attainment and outcomes links to all of our curriculum principles, notably supporting the needs of all learners and articulating a course-wide approach to learning. Inclusive teaching is not about lowering standards. Instead, it is about ensuring our students can work in a way that enables them to fulfil their academic potential by enabling them to work effectively in a way that is transparent, efficient, and flexible.

The Centre for Learning and Teaching have resources and content to consider the ways in which we teach and assess to ensure it is inclusive of all students.

You could start with their overview of the degree awarding gaps or their framework for inclusive teaching and explore their resources from there.

Student Research Projects

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Do you have students in your department who are interested in education focused social mobility, social equity, access and participation, widening participation? We are collating a list of potential dissertation/final year UG project questions some could be used for Masters projects or even PGR research.

The aim of this list is to collate interesting questions the institution has in the areas of social equality in education. We hope we will get lots of students to explore these questions and make recommendations that the institution can use to influence future research or practice. We hope to collate all the findings and publish some of them in insight reports on the University's website and maybe share with external organisations like TASO's HEEL repository to support practice across the sector.

We're currently developing this list so if you have questions or if you are interested in seeing the list please get in touch with Andrew Ross for a chat.

Contact us

For more details about how you can get involved please get in touch.