Enhancing BME student success through staff-student collaboration
The aim is to develop an university-wide action plan to enhance BME student degree attainment; to have commitment to the implementation of this plan at strategic and operational levels; to have piloted a BME peer mentoring scheme; and for the university to have adopted improvements in BME degree attainment as a Key Performance Indicator.
This project is designed to reduce the gap between the degree attainment of White and BME students focussing primarily on students undertaking ‘professional’ courses such as Law Social Work and Accountancy. We will work with a small group of BME student researchers to explore qualitatively BME students’ rationales for undertaking their respective courses how they imagine their future ‘possible selves’ their understanding of the labour market they intend to enter and their experiences of issues around equality and discrimination. We will deliver a series of short research training sessions with the student researchers followed by a focus group designed to identify key research questions. A series of focus groups and in-depth interviews with BME students will follow culminating in a student and staff focus group analysing and exploring findings from the research. This will feed into the development of a clear action plan to improve degree attainment for BME students.
