Veritas Working with You FACE Conference 2009 Report in Progress: BME Students: Great Expectations

Veritas Working with You Aims for session  Doing educational research  The project in progress  Issues when ‘taking on’ an existing project  Collaborative research at a distance  Tentative results  Sharing knowledge and experience  Next steps

Veritas Working with You Getting in and staying in  Staffordshire, Stoke on Trent, Shropshire and Telford and Wrekin Lifelong Learning Network  An invitation  Original project proposal  Negotiations with sponsor and stakeholders  Revised project and action plan

Veritas Working with You Kicking Off  Consultation with LLN and stakeholders  Three FECs  Meetings with individual FECs and key players  Development and delivery of questionnaire  Focus groups ‘out in the community’  Individual interviews with respondents

Veritas Working with You Harsh Realities  Securing ‘buy-in’ from college staff  Meeting deadlines  Developing and proposing alternative ways to obtain relevant data  Liaison with sponsor and stakeholders

Veritas Working with You “Hands-on”  Literature Review  Issues – defining BME learners  Constructing the questionnaire  A closer look at the questionnaire  Interim results and some key findings

Veritas Working with You Great Expectations Literature Review Why the Difference? A Closer Look at Higher Education Minority Ethnic Students and Graduates (Connor, Tyers, Modood, Hillage, 2004 ) Key Messages

Veritas Working with You   Minority ethnic people are more likely to take HE qualifications than White people   …aspirations and expectations of the value of, and benefits from, higher qualifications is a more significant positive ‘driver’ for minority ethnic than for White students   ‘Great Expectations’   But when the findings in Why the Difference are disaggregated Connor et al found:

Veritas Working with You   The minority ethnic population does not participate in HE in a uniform way   All minority ethnic groups do not do as well in degree performance as White students on average

Veritas Working with You   when gender is also taken into account, …the female Bangladeshi participation rate … drops below that of both the White male and female groups   Minority ethnic students are clustered at certain universities, mostly post-92 universities in London This pattern relates to locality (high representation of minority ethnic population in the London area and many students stay locally)

Veritas Working with You  So BME is not really a very useful aggregation as it is very difficult to say anything about this ‘group’ that you do not have to qualify immediately  ‘The Devil is in the detail’  Questionnaire design is rather like playing ‘battleships’ – you phrase the questions hoping to hit some aspect of truth

Veritas Working with You Construction of questionnaire  Initial review of literature  Brainstorming  Feedback from stakeholders including key members of ethnic minority communities  Final draft reviewed by LLN Steering Group  Test administration with a small number of BME FE students to check general comprehensibility

Veritas Working with You Questionnaire structure  Five sections –  Ethnicity (using Census categories) and other demographic data  Education experience to 16  Present experience if in education now  Any discontinuities in education - reasons  Future plans – focused on HE

Veritas Working with You Questionnaire content  Aim to obtain rich data field – hence length  Mixture of multiple choice, checklists and short-answer open-ended items  Attempt to reduce complexity by using sectional structure

Veritas Working with You The sample  Convenience sample of minority FE and 6th FC students (N=47)  Includes mature students recently arrived in UK  At present shows bias towards Indian and Pakistani origins (No Bangladeshi respondents)

Veritas Working with You The questionnaire in use  Average completion time minutes  Apparent length may be inhibiting some respondents  Poor response to some items  Difficulties in comprehending some questions (e.g. Q.28)  See questionnaire -

Veritas Working with You Some Data  Age: Range yrs, Median 21 yrs  Sex: Males = 23, Females =24  29 different languages spoken in homes:

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Veritas Working with You Thank you  For your interest and participation  Any further questions? Key Reference: Why the Difference? A Closer Look at Higher Education Minority Ethnic Students and Graduates Connor, Tyers, Modood and Hillage, Institute for Employment Studies 2004