Billy and Lydia will talk about methods of engagement they have employed at Reading to build evaluation culture, such as resource hubs, a community of practice, meeting staff where they’re at in a supportive way. We will discuss our ‘distributed evaluation’ model whereby all members of staff feel a sense of ownership about evaluation, along with our Student Evaluation Officer scheme. We will also touch on more recent work to embed evaluation in Teaching and Learning more broadly.

Billy Wong is a Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University of Reading. He is the University's Director of Research and Evaluation (Access & Participation), where he leads work on evaluation strategy, practice and culture across APP activities. His research focuses on educational identities and inequalities, space and belonging, especially in higher education and STEM education. His work explores the changing views and experiences of university students and staff, and has contributed to the development of concepts including science capital and the ideal student.

Lydia Fletcher is a Research and Evaluation Manager at the University of Reading. They work on evaluation relating to educational inequality, particularly focusing on Access & Participation targets, covering pre-entry, on course and career outcomes. They are keenly interested in the use of robust data for decision making, and work to enhance evaluation culture across the University.

In this session, Julie will talk about the challenges of building cross-institutional evaluation capacity and share some of the methods they have employed at Herts to adapt to a sizeable reduction in evaluation resource.

Julie Vuolo is is Deputy Head of Widening Access and Student Success at the University of Hertfordshire. She supports the strategic delivery of the access and participation plan and leads the data and evaluation and student success aspects of the work. Julie has worked in Higher Education for over 20 years, during which time she has undertaken a variety of academic and professional roles all of which have had the support and success of students at their heart.