Abstract

This report presents the findings for Phase 2 of the local evaluation of the Lincolnshire Uni Connect raising Higher Education aspirations project. Funded by the Office for Students, this national initiative is managed locally by the LiNCHigher partnership. Phase 2 ran from August 2019 to July 2021. Delivery of the programme, and therefore the evaluation, encountered much disruption due to the global Covid-19 pandemic which began in the UK in March 2020. The evaluation assessed the impact of the Uni Connect programme on school and college students in Lincolnshire.
The evaluation team, based in the Lincoln Higher Education Research Institute (LHERI) at the University of Lincoln, produced an interim report at the end of the first year of Phase 2 that presented key findings and made recommendations for the second year of the Uni Connect programme (Rose and Mallinson, 2020a). The full report is available on the LHERI website whilst a condensed version was published in the online journal, New Directions in the Teaching of Physical Sciences (Rose and Mallinson, 2021). A literature review outlining the programme’s theoretical underpinnings has also been published (Rose and Mallinson, 2020b).