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Our Access and Participation Plan (APP) helps us ensure equal opportunities for all students. It is central to our educational offer and has impact across the whole University.  The plan seeks to address specific barriers, recognised across the sector, that students may face in accessing university and achieving their potential when here. For example, East Sussex, where many of our students have been at school, has the second lowest rate of progression to higher education in the country for people who have been eligible for free school meals. Through our APP we are working with other universities in Sussex to tackle this.

Our current APP runs until the end of the 2024/25 academic year. In the meantime, we will be launching our new APP (which runs from 2025 to 2029) this autumn. Staff and students across the University have helped develop the new plan, which focuses broadly on three key areas: tackling socioeconomic barriers, challenging ethnicity related awarding gap, and ensuring an inclusive environment for mental wellbeing.

Our collaborative approach to encouraging success for all students

Our new APP will help drive work that connects across the whole University. It sets out some of the current and future initiatives that will help us to support students who are at greatest risk of experiencing inequalities, as well as benefitting all students at Sussex.

Here is a snapshot of some of the key activities within our whole provider approach:

• Embedding employability: including increasing experiential learning and authentic assessment in the taught curriculum, helping students to develop entrepreneurial approaches, and embedding transferrable skills in modules.
• Curriculum Reimagined: the University’s review of curriculum and assessments aims to ensure greater inclusivity in course content, learning resources, teaching and assessment. This will help us deliver our strategic aims to improve the student experience, reduce awarding gaps and improve graduate outcomes.
• Academic success: we will develop a consistent offer of academic support for all students, including support that students can access based on their own strengths and areas for improvement, encouraging successful progress between stages of study.
• Student voice: we are working collaboratively with the University of Sussex Students’ Union to enhance our processes for hearing student voice, particularly those from under-represented student groups, actioning their feedback and closing feedback loops.

Collaboration will be essential to ensuring that our whole provider approach is successful - people and teams across our whole University community will be key to making this happen.

Helping meet targeted objectives to support under-represented students

The APP includes targeted activities to support under-represented students, and close the largest gaps in student outcomes. Activities were developed in consultation with students and staff, and include:

• Widening Participation programme for schools and colleges, including advice and guidance, summer schools, careers workshops, revision support and more
• ‘Begin at Sussex’ and ‘Belong at Sussex’ programmes to support students through their years at Sussex
• Residential Life Connectors working within University halls of residence
• Race Equity Advocates working to improve the experience of students of colour
• Career Lab: Internships, student consultancy, and Junior Research Associate scheme to support students’ progression into highly-skilled employment or further study.

Next steps

Once our new APP has been approved by the Office for Students (OfS) this summer, it will be finalised in autumn 2024 – when we’ll launch this – and take effect from the start of the 2025/26 academic year. We will keep you updated about progress on the Staff Hub and you can find out more about our current APP on the Access and Participation Plan webpage.

If you've got ideas on how we can make our support even better, or if you want to get involved in making a difference through the Access and Participation Plan, we want to hear from you. Contact APP Programme Manager, Jo McKinney-Green with your thoughts.