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


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


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


At many institutions, these weeks mark the beginning of university for a new cohort of first year students. Orientation Week (or O Week) is when we invite our commencing students onto campus, generally bombard them with lots of information, perhaps even feed them and generally squeeze as much exposure to the institution as is possible… Read More


Welcome to 2018! Following a slight hiatus on the First-in-Family blogs, I have prioritised a regular blog after receiving data on how many people actually read the blogs in 2016-2017 – with just under 2,000 reads I have been inspired to keep writing! One of the reasons the blog entries diminished was due to my… Read More