The Fellowship also explored Canadian and US approaches to retaining first-in-family students – in Canada this included visits to both Western University and also, University of Toronto. The latter is a large urban institution with over 90,000 students spread over three campuses within the city, the largest cohort is domestic undergraduate students but there is a… Read More


The University of Brighton is the home for the Centre for Higher Education Equity Research (CHEER), whose objective is to research the  ‘systems, structures, cultures, experiences and consequences of inequities within higher education’. I was able to chat with Dr Emily Danvers, Dr Tamsin Hinton-Smith and also, Professor Louise Morley (Head of CHEER) to reflect upon their… Read More


Over the two days of this visit I also discussed the new project that MMU has introduced for First in Family students called The FirstGen Scheme. This is a flagship project that has only commenced in the last two years and adopts a whole of student life cycle approach to supporting FiF students beginning at the… Read More


The Churchill Fellowship began with a visit to Manchester – a city of great tradition and growth having a city scape dotted with building sites and development – not surprisingly Manchester has one of the largest number of cranes (n=64) within a city centre. My two day visit was with Prof Claire Hamshire and colleagues in order to discuss… Read More


    The Australian Learning and Teaching Fellows network includes Australia’s leading higher education scholars, who bring a wealth of experience in evidenced-based approaches to support student success and high-quality learning and teaching. In recognition of this expertise, they have created the ALTF Student Success blog: a forum for Fellows to share their insights and… Read More


This week’s blog comes from Dr Janine Delahunty and reflects upon the notion of intersectionality and how this plays out in students’ lives. Drawing on the data collected from the current Discovery Project on First in Family persistence behaviours, Janine provides a snapshot of both the resilience and cultural strengths that our diverse student cohort… Read More


That’s probably a conditioning from a working-class family that didn’t see university as an option.  Honestly, when you sat down as a child and you said, “I want to be an astronaut” – that was not something that… that’s great when you’re five but by the time you’re 13, 14, living in a country town,… Read More