Weeks 2 and 3 of my placement
I’ve developed a wide range of skills during the second week at the Brilliant Club. My supervisor was away and has left me a list of tasks to complete that week. This has greatly aided the development of my time management, organisational and written communication skills as I was required to work independently and correspond with participants of the programme, which gave me a great insight into what working for a charity is really like.
During Weeks 2 and 3, I’ve continued my research into social mobility which is becoming more and more interesting, as I begin to draw links between different publications. In my last week’s post, I mentioned a government issued report, which highlighted London as a huge social mobility hotspot, however after looking at the participation in local areas data released by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, I now know that despite London being a social mobility hot spot, there are areas in the South West and East London where higher education participation is still very low.
This week I’ve read a research paper by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on widening participation in higher education, combining the data published by many different organisations. One of the most interesting things I found out is that the difference in higher education participation between students from disadvantaged backgrounds arises before entry into higher education, as is mostly due to long term consequences of disadvantaged students underachieving in secondary school, as opposed to students choosing not to attend university despite having the opportunity to do so. Therefore, it has been suggested that to overcome this problem, secondary school students should be targeted by social mobility programmes to ensure that they do not underachieve during their time at school. This particular problem is the aim of the Scholars Programme which I mentioned in my introductory post, as the programme supports the academic development of students from Year 6 to Year 12 thus widening access to higher education, which will be the focus of my next blog post.
I can’t believe the last 3 weeks passed so quickly!