Lucy Clague and Colin McCaig recently participated in NEON’s Summer Symposium held at the University of Exeter. As part of their attendance, they delivered a presentation focusing on the challenges faced in evaluating collaborative postgraduate widening participation programmes, drawing on their involvement in the YCEDE programme and other initiatives. Their paper was one of three presented within the session, that were all part of the 13 Research England/OfS funded projects. The other two papers were by colleagues from the EDEPI and ‘Developing fair selection models for historically marginalised postgraduate students at Oxford and Cambridge’ projects. In their presentation, Lucy and Colin discussed three key challenges: institutional differences; disciplinary differences; and data challenges.
During the informative seminar, they shared valuable insights on effectively sharing data across partnerships while prioritising the protection of student privacy and complying with legal regulations. They provided invaluable tips and guidance on the best practices for ensuring data security and privacy and ease of data transfer such as taking data sharing agreements into consideration from the outset, and being aware that institutions may deal permissions in different ways. Additionally, they directed attendees to a comprehensive data blog, which served as a valuable resource for further information and detailed strategies on responsible data sharing practices.