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Widening Access to Postgraduate Study Event

On 29th April, Linking London held its second postgraduate event. Increasingly described as the new frontier of social mobility, this event focused on how we widen access to postgraduate study. The event explored what the issues are and why it's important that we address them, how we identify widening participation students, current outreach practice and how we can work together going forward.

After a warm welcome and some scene setting from Andrew Jones, Director at Linking London, delegates heard first from Professor Paul Wakeling, Head of Department of Education, University of York who provided a perspective on widening participation to Postgraduate study giving an excellent overview of the current postgraduate landscape and its growth including looking at inequalities in postgraduate access, policy and measuring WP at postgraduate level.

Rosie Cox, Professor of Geography, Birkbeck University of London then spoke about developing a Postgraduate widening access offer looking at what Birkbeck’s access to Postgraduate may look like including study skills support, funding and developing new routes to Postgraduate Study.

We also heard about the Access to Postgraduate Study Scholarships which were highly successful and allowed them to gather quantitative and qualitative data about their PGT students, the situations that they are in and the barriers they face.

After a comfort break, attendees then went into two breakout groups to discuss the following questions:

In your institution what specific work/projects/schemes are going on to support PG widening access?

Are there any further issues/challenges your institution faces, with PG widening access, that we haven’t discussed already today?
Looking ahead what can we do collaboratively to encourage greater widening access at PG level and how do you think Linking London can support this?

The group then reconvened and discussed the main points of their discussions and the next steps. The full write up of the discussions can be found here.

The event closed with thanking everyone for their contributions throughout the afternoon and by asking attendees for feedback and ideas for any future events.

Presentations, recording and discussion notes

To view the recording, presentations and the notes from the day please click here. This link will take you to the Linking London SharePoint Partners' Area. You must be a Linking London member to access this section of the website. If you do not have access, please email info@linkinglondon.ac.uk.