Reflections from the NEON Summer Symposium 2025

Sarah Dirrane 8 Jul 2025

Some conferences just debate the answers, this one actually left me with better questions…

This year’s symposium, held in Salford and was framed around the theme of place. How where we live, learn, and grow shapes who we are and what we imagine for ourselves. As someone who has spent years listening to students, I was reminded again that place is an integral part of a student’s lived experience.

Listening to Place

The opening keynote from Professor Nic Beech set the tone. His message… Salford isn’t separate from its community “it is the community”. Their mission statement wasn’t written behind a closed door, but co-created with an impressive 2,000 voices. This is a great example of showing what it looks like to be intentional about your relationship with stakeholders.

I was very pleased to chair the opening panel on local and regional collaboration. Both a lively and interesting debate, and one which I thoroughly enjoyed! What stood out wasn’t just the examples of partnership, it was the honesty about the challenges it can also bring. Emily McGrath spoke about the sheer scale of the work they do at InTo University , reaching over 46,000 young people. Allan Milne reminded us that collaboration isn’t just about shared outcomes, it’s about also having the skills and mindset. Peter Riley said it best: this work should never be in our own self-interest. It should always be about the young people.

Nic introduced the idea of a “collaborative advantage”, the kind of synergy that emerges when people come together, not to compete, but to serve. A phrase that perfectly summarised the opportunities that can exist when collaboration is successfully executed.

What FE Students Wish You Knew

Louisa Dobson and I delivered a session on what FE students wish outreach professionals understood.

I shared findings from over 35,000 student voices and the segmentation tool we have built to give practitioners a clearer view of who they are working with on the ground. One of our key messages was that demographic data alone does not help us to accurately target provisions.

A student’s postcode won’t tell you how confident they feel, or whether they have made their mind up about HE. It won’t tell you how supported they feel in their decision-making, or whether they are quietly struggling. Yet we often hear of outreach work being shaped by broad categories when it comes to targeting and delivery.

Louisa shared the brilliant work they have carried out with Askham Bryan College, where segmentation helped the college to understand their own students better and design much more tailored support – that ultimately increased engagement and impact on student’s attitudes towards HE.

The results from partnership are very encouraging. Increases in HE confidence were visible across the board, for example, the number of students identified as ‘HE Confident’ rose from 27.7% to 41.8% after targeted interventions. Importantly, they also saw a decrease in the number of ‘HE Sceptics’. This shows that it wasn’t just a data shift, but reflected a genuine change in how students were thinking about their futures.

These shifts in perspective and attitude are not unique to this case study. We have been seeing these results across the board when interventions are designed and targeted with the 4 segments in mind.

Interested to hear more on this? I have also written a separate blog about our paper session which you access here.

What FE Students Wish You Knew

Zooming in: gaps the averages don’t show

Several of the paper sessions took a closer look at the student groups and regions that often slip through the cracks in national data and strategy.

Roisin Quinn’s presentation on mature students at the University of Exeter challenged the idea that the South-West is a region without need. Her session was a reminder that surface-level perceptions of affluence don’t reflect the realities of students juggling jobs, families, and the decision to return to education later in life. She spoke about the intersection of age and socioeconomic background, and how those overlapping factors create barriers that aren’t always visible in institutional reporting.

One example, in particular, stood out. The university introduced a maths transition programme as they realised students were being excluded from certain courses due to academic gaps, not lack of potential. This kind of institutional adjustment signals a willingness to adapt based on who the students are, not who we assume them to be.

Jon Rainford presented findings from a national survey of educators on the topic of working-class boys. His research explored how boys experience school environments, particularly around respect and engagement. Teachers often believed they were showing respect through structure and discipline, but the boys described something different, a sense of being overlooked or not spoken to directly.

Jon shared that for many of the boys involved, the most impactful experiences came from educators who made time to talk to them properly, without assumption or judgement. It wasn’t about tone or technique, it was about presence and consistency. One key point was that the adult’s gender mattered less than whether they were genuinely interested in the student in front of them.

It raised important questions for those of us working in outreach. If school has felt like a place where you are not acknowledged or taken seriously, then why would you see further or higher education as somewhere you would belong? A story we have seen play out many times in the research we have conducted with underrepresented students over the years.

Frances Sit from the Ruskin Institute added a structural dimension with her research on coastal cold spots. The data showed sharp disparities in progression rates, especially when broken down by local context. In London, nearly half of young people on free school meals go on to higher education. In some coastal areas, that figure is less than half of that.

She iterated how the idea of the “coast” isn’t just one definition. There are urban coastal towns, rural coastal villages and areas with very different economic profiles, and they each come with distinct challenges. When you only look at national averages, you lose the important detail.

Frances was highlighting a common blind spot in how data can sometimes be presented. So much of our work can be guided by generalised data, but if we want to make progress in the places where it’s needed most, there is a need to be more precise. That means being able to bring into consideration the geography, the infrastructure, the transport routes, and the local pathways.

Funding, reach and what comes next

Ant Sutcliffe’s session added useful context to the wider discussion around funding and the future of HE outreach. He mapped out the steady decline in national outreach funding over the past two decades, which put numbers to what many in the sector have long been feeling – being asked to deliver more, often with fewer resources and less certainty.

He also made a clear economic case. For every £1 spent on outreach, the return is nearly £6. Students who engage with this work are significantly more likely to apply to higher education than their peers. The impact is not just visible, it’s measurable.

There was discussion around the proposed shift to regional access partnerships. The questions raised were thoughtful and grounded – how can local context be preserved? Will students lose access to the kinds of targeted support that come from local understanding? Can delivery remain meaningful if it’s stretched across large geographic regions?

Whilst the call for evidence is yet to conclude, what is apparent is that this is a moment that could shape access work for years to come.

The questions to pose here are around not only the practical considerations, but also the strategic perspective of regional access targets and how future priorities are identified and set.

Looking up: systems, structure and what’s next

Chris Millward’s keynote closed out the first day with a wide-angle view of the tertiary system and how it connects with the economy. He reflected on the increasing supply of graduates in the UK and the reality that this growth hasn’t been matched by the kind of economic gains or productivity improvements that were expected. There’s a real concern about what happens to students post-graduation, particularly those who don’t enter high-demand sectors.

He pointed to STEM graduates as one of the few groups still seeing a clear return in terms of wage premiums. However, outside of that, the picture is more uncertain, and that uncertainty is compounded by where a student lives. Geographic inequality is still a major factor, and progress in access isn’t always translating into longer-term outcomes.

It was a useful reminder that improving access alone isn’t enough. We also have to think about where that access leads, and how students are supported to succeed after they progress on to HE.

On day two, John Blake gave a much-anticipated keynote following the OfS’s recent call for evidence on regional access partnerships. He spoke about the shift in student patterns, particularly the rise in commuter students, and the implications this has for how we define student need. He acknowledged that the current system tends to reward institutions for recruiting the most able students from disadvantaged backgrounds, with less incentive to support the broader cohort.

He asked the sector to engage with the big questions now on the table:

Should we move to a regional structure for access and participation work?

What does meaningful accountability for public money look like?

How do we preserve local understanding and delivery within larger regional frameworks?

Both keynotes highlighted different transition points that the sector is facing, one economic, the other structural.

Final thoughts…..

Across both days, I have reflected and come back to the same thought: we need to stay close to the students we are supporting.

That means listening carefully. Working collaboratively, and delving into the detail, not just of place, but of experience. It is in those local insights, in the conversations on the ground, and in the nuance of students’ lives that the needle can really shift for students.

This year’s symposium certainly surfaced better questions – and right now, that feels like exactly the right place to start. It is in asking the right questions that we lay the groundwork for more thoughtful, more impactful work.

Until next time….

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