This section of the Fair Access Toolkit provides links to a wide range of support materials, guidance documents, frameworks and tools that you can use to help design and deliver evaluations of widening access activities and interventions. The aim is that by signposting useful resources, the Toolkit will help raise awareness of the importance of high quality evaluation and improve understanding of how to achieve this. It is not intended to turn practitioners into professional evaluators – you may still want to get expert help, but we hope that the resources collected here will help practitioners make more confident decisions about if, when and how to evaluate and feel better equipped to design and deliver small-scale evaluations in particular. If you decide you want to commission someone else to carry-out an evaluation for you, the resources here should help you develop your specification and assess proposals.
Some of the materials signposted are designed specifically for evaluating widening access initiatives. Others are more generic good practice guides. Some are designed for other sectors, but are likely to be useful to widening access practitioners.
If you are aware of a resource that you think would be a useful addition to the Toolkit, please get in contact.