Student outreach work – why bother?

I have got a few things I want to catch up on – and you’ll be pleased to know it is not another Heated Rivalry post. It feels like I spent most of January asleep and most of February trying to wake up and catch up. I have not caught up, of course I haven’t. If I could actually catch up, that would suggest I don’t have a full time job… anyway. In the middle of my flu sickness absence, just as the coughing and snot production switched into crippling fatigue and stomach issues, I had a couple of days of almost coherence. Those two days coincided with the HELOA Conference I had agreed to go speak at with my absolutely brilliant colleague Jack Cooper. Here’s the blurb from the conference programme:

1.6: Working with academic colleagues to deliver effective outreach – Ballroom

Jack Cooper | Schools and Colleges Engagement Officer | Leeds Trinity University

Dr Jess Guth | Head of School of Business and Law | Leeds Trinity University

Engaging subject-level outreach is crucial to building meaningful relationships with schools and colleges and helping to breakdown barriers for students to access Higher Education. In this workshop, Jack Cooper, Schools and Colleges Engagement Officer and Dr Jess Guth, Head of School of Law from Leeds Trinity University will talk through their collaborative approach to designing and delivering high-impact subject outreach.

Honestly, I don’t really remember giving the talk that much. I remember struggling to breathe and being tired and struggling to hold onto thoughts. I also remember Jack being a really good presenter and setting the scene really well. In essence the argument was that Universities doing outreach work with Schools and Colleges is important for a variety of reasons – social justice, raising aspiration and widening access and participations and of course recruitment. I think I was the only academic in a room full of professional services staff. I think often running outreach sessions, travelling to schools and colleges or welcoming them to campus feels like another thing dumped on academics, another thing to do that doesn’t feel like it is really our job, something to be got out of. I have certainly worked with academics with attitudes like that over the course of my career. We argued that the relationships between the professional services team and academic staff is key to doing good, meaningful and effective outreach. We encouraged participants of the workshop to think about what they do, why, if it works, how it could be better and what maybe just needs to be stopped. It seemed to go well. It is also the only conference ever where, as a speaker, I received a thank you card.

Since the conference I have had cause to think more about outreach work for several reasons. One is that we are in the craziness of the student number planning cycle, workload planning and thinking about how many students we will have and when, where and how to teach them. Another is that I have recently received the outreach impact report from Jack’s team. As I have been working through spreadsheets my mind has been wandering off thinking about 2 different things in relation to outreach work: The first is a question about why I have never seen it as an add on. Even as a baby academic, I loved doing outreach sessions, I genuinely enjoyed going into Schools and Colleges, chatting to potential students, learning from their teachers. And I still do. But why? The second is about why we do this work and how we know if it works.

So first, why do I like this work? I think it is because I have never seen it as a recruitment activity as such. Of course that is usually how it is positioned for a university like mine. We need to be visible to the 17/18 year olds in our region. We need them to choose us. We are not a selective institution, we have to actively recruit. I understand that the outreach work is basically that. But to me it has always been the other stuff that matters more. I am a teacher at heart and outreach work is teaching. I have stood in so many classrooms in Keighley, Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham and surrounding areas and seen how the stories I can tell about my journey into Law or my friends’ journeys to university and beyond changes the perception of what is possible.

I taught a Law class at a local 6th Form in Keighley about a decade ago and was confronted by an angry young woman. She said ‘Why are you here? People like us don’t go to university. Go tick your boxes somewhere else’. I didn’t know what to say to her. I let her get in my face, I let her storm out. I said nothing when she came back in. I could have told her that I did my A-Levels in Keighley and I went to uni. Many of my friends grew up in some of the most deprived areas of Keighley, an already pretty poor town, and went to uni. I have told that story so many times and it always helps shift perspective. But somehow confronted with that anger, it didn’t seem right. It felt like I, we, had somehow got out and left a generation behind. We hadn’t made it better for those who came after us. It seems that the older I get, the more the ‘I sat where you are sitting now and look at me know’ narrative just feels smug and patronising. As I finished my session, I asked whether I could go sit with the angry young woman for a bit and ask her some questions. Of course her initial response was ‘Why do you care’. But she didn’t leave. In the end we talked for about 20 minutes. She wanted to be a lawyer but was already being told she needed to get that nonsense out of her head and go get a job. Finishing School was a luxury, going to university was outrageous. There was no money to support her, there was no understanding about what a university was, how it worked or what might be possible. I tried to explain, as best I could because I realised that explaining universities is hard – they’re weird! I can’t say that she was friendly but she was curious, she asked lots of questions. Then I left. I didn’t hear from her again. I don’t know what she is doing now but I do know that she went to a very prestigious university to study Law – her teacher told us. I think about her often. I hope that whatever she took from our conversation, she used it to help her get to where she wanted to be. She changed how I think about outreach work. It’s my opportunity to understand where today’s kids, tomorrow’s students, are in terms of their journeys, their understanding of what the future holds, their views on the world and their expectations of what comes next. She taught me to never assume anything and be prepared to abandon prepared sessions and activities and to focus on connection. Conversation is more important than content. Creating a space where the basics of degrees, universities, legal institutions and careers can be talked about without feeling embarrassed at not knowing and showing up in a way that makes clear that there are people out there, strangers at this point, who believe in them and are willing to take a chance on them are the most important things. I’m not there to persuade them to enrol with whatever university I happen to be working for – although I love seeing familiar faces arrive for welcome week – I am there to help them realise that the power to change their world is right there for them to grasp and if they let us in just a little bit, we will be right there with them.

Outreach work helps me design better transitions from College to Uni, it helps me create better teaching materials and use better examples, it helps me meet my students where they are and it makes me a better teacher. It also reminds me of my own privilege and the distance that can create and it reminds me that making the world a better place is our job and that while if often feels that way, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Even if it is just the one student encounter described above (and I think there are more), I am honoured to have been part of a little nudge that propelled her to jump into, what was for her and her family, a terrifying unknown, but one that had the potential to change her life. I hope it did.

I think in answering the first question, I have also answered the why we do it question. I guess I can’t speak for others but in summary, I do it because it changes the world for the better. Does it work? I don’t know. I know from the impact data that we have, that our outreach work generates applications for our courses. So for those who do it purely from a recruitment point of view – it seems to work. Does it change the world? Does it shift perspectives on what is possible? It often feels like it but actually I will never really know what impact I have. I like to think that sometimes I make a difference, that I am part of the spark that puts into focus that nothing is impossible and that whoever you thought you were, you deserve to go after your dreams. I don’t need data to tell me that I am helping to raise aspirations, creating the possibility to imagine a what if. And to be clear, I don’t care whether that what if is about becoming the next hot shot lawyer or rocket scientist or about living off grid and being self-sufficient or about finding your person and raising a huge family – or all of those things at different points in time. The power lies in the confidence to define your own what ifs. I know the power of being given the confidence and freedom to figure out my what if. I grew up in an environment where there was no real pressure to do well and no pressure at all to do anything specific, just lots of support for figuring out my dream and then living it. If I can be a tiny little bit of that for one or two kids I am lucky enough to cross paths with in those Schools and Colleges, then yeah, outreach work works.