Intervention Strategies are a core part of the new Access and Participation Plan structure. They are effectively action plans of how we as an institution will mitigate the Risks to Equality of Opportunity we've identified and how we'll achieve the targets we’ve set out in the plan.
As part of our consultations on Risks we identified most of the activity that was occurring across the University and we began our production of Intervention Strategies by mapping this work against the risks, identification of risk and target groups. As we did this, we recognised that one broad activity (for example outreach programme) would cut across many different risks and many different target groups. Rather than make the Intervention Strategies an operationally detailed plan we took the approach of having an intervention strategy for each part of the lifecycle and then having each activity listed once with it then linked to the associated risks and target groups. This approach allowed us to have a clear set of outcomes we expect to achieve with the activities and allowed us to clearly link to evaluation and subsequent mapping of detailed activity.
Once we had an approach outlined, we organised several workshops with key stakeholders in each of the lifecycle phases. These workshops focused on building a Theory of Change which ultimately led to delivery plans for the teams and the decision about new activity and which activities to stop.
The Intervention Strategies then became a summary version of the Theory of Change for each part of the student journey.
Once we had all the Intervention Strategies together we needed to cost out the activity to give a total spend for each intervention strategy. Where costs were too high we had to reconsider the activity being delivered and restructure the Intervention Strategy to fit within the agreed budget.
After approval of the APP the Intervention Strategies have become a key tool for monitoring implementation across the institution. Each delivery team has created more detailed delivery plans based on the structures of the Intervention Strategy linking programme outcomes to the broader outcomes in the Intervention Strategy. The APP Oversight Group (a representative group of senior leaders who oversee the delivery of the APP and report to the Senior Education Advisory Board) uses the Intervention Strategies to structure its business and to monitor implementation.
This blog is part of a series of blogs about how we prepared our new Access and Participation Plan for wave 1 submission in 2023.
