This project was funded by TASO (a What Works Centre affiliated with the Office for Students) to explore how universities can utilise the student data it habitually collates to demonstrate the impact of its post-entry student success initiatives.

As part of this wider project, which included 3 other institutions (Nottingham Trent, East Anglia and Huddersfield Universities), Lancaster University undertook to conduct an evaluation of the Lancaster Success Programme, a large-scale programme of support offered to students from a widening participation background during their studies. The programme utilises a coaching-informed approach offering regular one-to-one coaching sessions, group coaching sessions (Action Learning Sets) and a variety of social and other preparatory support with the aim of helping students achieve success while studying at Lancaster University.

The project undertook two adjacent studies, the first was an Implementation and Process Evaluation (IPE) which was delivered by the Lancaster University, and overseen by Matthew Pawelski, and an Impact Evaluation (IE) undertaken by an external team of researchers based at Staffordshire University. As part of the project a series of collaborative workshops took place where participant universities came together to share challenges and opportunities associated with utilising institutional data linked to students. These varied from ethics, data purity, standardisation, accessibility and availability of relevant skills and capacity. These workshops have resulted in the development of a number of resources and toolkits published alongside the project.

More focussed work was then undertaken to complete the IPE. Two project assistants (Talia Sharkawi and Rossana Palma) were hired to support data collation, analysis and writing of the report. The IPE explored in detail how the LSP has been implemented and delivered in practice, exploring the extent to which the various activities have been delivered in line with expectations and examined trends in participation, engagement and programme completion. These analyses combined with historic qualitative evaluations provided the evidence basis to assess the extent to which the LSP was delivered as intended and highlighted some of the practical and contextual factors that might inhibit the sort of analyses intended in the IE.

The IE aimed to utilise Quasi-Experimental Design (QED) methods with the aim of exploring the observable impact of the LSP on student outcomes and to highlight how such methods might be practically deployed in an institutional setting. The analyses were hampered by data quality and accessibility, also by the small sample sizes available. A range of valuable lessons and recommendations were revealed by these studies, including when the deployment of such methods might or might not be warranted.