Primary

There are examples of Excellence Challenge and Aimhigher Partnerships having worked with primary schools for many years. It is also possible to find many good examples of engagement between higher education institutions (HEIs) and the primary sector. However the real driver for working with primary schools was the recommendations of the National Council for Educational Excellence (NCEE) in the 2008 report, 'National Council for Educational Excellence: Recommendations', (available to download here in PDF ). Recommendation two stated:

“ Every primary school should devote time to work on raising student aspirations to take up a place in higher education. Schools and HEIs should try to ensure that every pupil visits a higher education campus either during primary or early secondary education, concentrating initially on schools in low participation or deprived areas.”

This was followed up in 2009 by the NCEE Higher Education Mobilisation strand – Implementation Plan (available to download in PDF ) which provided more detail on how this should be achieved.

The NCEE established an ‘Ambassadors Group’ to work on these recommendations and Action on Access has provided this group with two reports on engagement with the primary sector. The first published in March 2009 provided an overview of the varying types of engagement, whilst the second resulted from a comprehensive questionnaire sent to all Aimhigher partnerships and was published in July 2009 . The findings were very promising, showing that over half of all Aimhigher partnerships engaged with the primary sector despite the fact that it was beyond their original brief. Of these partnerships, 50% had well established programmes and over 600 schools and 26,626 pupils were involved. It is our intention to follow this up with a look at higher education engagement later in the year.

It is clearly the case that the younger that work is done with learners the more chance there is of turning them on to the idea of progressing into higher education. They are often more receptive in primary school and have clear, albeit less formed, aspirations. The transition from primary to secondary is often a time of retrenchment for pupils and in terms of widening participation it is vital to work to ease this difficulty.

We would be most grateful if you could send us any examples of successful work being carried out with the primary sector so that we might use our website to showcase it to other practitioners. Please email info@actiononaccess.org with any relevant material.