NERUPI Framework Overview
The NERUPI Framework grew out of widening participation practice and was developed by Annette Hayton, University of Bath and Dr Andrew Bengry, Bath Spa University.
Regulators require Higher Education providers in the UK to show the effect of their widening participation interventions. In England, the Office for Students (OfS) asks HEIs to report on evaluation in their Access and Participation Monitoring Statements and robust evaluation is integral to the collaborative outreach Uni Connect programme.
The pressure from regulators to demonstrate impact continues to increase. However, in the effort to ensure rigour and comparability it is easy to develop simplistic approaches to evaluation that lose sight of the underlying reasons for unequal access and differential attainment and progression.
The NERUPI Framework seeks to address this by providing a thought-through approach to widening participation programme design and evaluation, bringing together insights from theory, research and practice. It combines:
- Clear aims with an appreciation of context
- Comparability without uniformity in delivery
- Rigour without prescription of research or evaluation methods
NERUPI supports practitioners and evaluators in designing, evaluating and reporting on their WP interventions and effectively capturing and demonstrating the impact of their work. Contact us for further information about the NERUPI Framework.