Changes within the partnership: Politechnika Lodzka – CU Lodz: 1

Educational Opportunities, University of Liverpool
& Children University of Lodz - Politechnika Lodzka
Changes within the partnership:
1. Definition
At the beginning of the Mentoring Associates programme, the Department
of Chemistry of the University of Liverpool was partner with the Children
University of Lodz. Due to professional obligations, the contact person from
the Department of Chemistry was not able to get involved and participate as
much as originally planned, therefore, the Educational Opportunities department stepped forward and took the lead on the University of Liverpool side.
What is meant by ‘Widening Participation’ and ‘Fair Access’ in the United
Kingdom?
“In some streets in the UK 8 out of 10 young people WILL attend university. In other streets, 8 out of 10 will NOT attend” Tricia Jenkins,MBE
Widening participation involves removing the barriers to higher education, including financial barriers that students from lower income and other underrepresented backgrounds face. It refers to the participation of disadvantaged
groups in higher education generally. ‘Fair Access’ refers to the distribution of
such students across England’s universities and colleges and whether this is fair
by a number of socio-economic and educational criteria (Is there fair representation of disadvantaged groups in the elite or research intensive universities?).
The partnership now focuses on a strongly relevant topic:
“Why we do what we do?” – Children University type
activities.
For the Children’s University of Lodz, the interesting and
most important question is: “how Liverpool managed to attract children from Locally Defined Minorities to the university?”
2 Our audience
University of Liverpool staff
participating in an African
music workshop
Lodz - December 2013
Politechnika Lodzka – CU Lodz:
At the beginning of our mentoring partnership, we hoped to get
more information on how Liverpool managed to attract poor children to the university; this is the most important part for me.
Robotics workshop for for
7-12 year old children
Lodz Children University
Which children attend
activities?
Most children are from
families and areas where
the likelihood to go to
University is high.
At the University of Liverpool there are two aspects to our outreach work.
Faculties and departments work with schools and colleges to promote subjects and engage young people irrespective of their social/class criteria.
Educational
Opportunities
has
a different mission. We engage only those young people who meet specific criteria:
- from schools or communities who
have little tradition of participating
in higher education
- young people from low socio-economic backgrounds (working class
youth)
- young people from Black or Minor- Part of our This is your World project
ity Ethnic (BME) backgrounds ( e.g. working with 16 year old unemployed
African-Caribbean, Asian descent,
youth from an inner city estate
traveler children, young people from
parts of EU, e.g. Poland, Romania).
- disabled young people
- young people in Local Authority
Care
3. Range of programmes
Why we do what we do?
- To change student preferences and have in future more engineers (there is a
lack, already visible, on the labour market) than unemployed graduates in humanities
- To target underprivileged children who are less likely to go to University because of their social background
Why should you target children who are less likely to go to University?
and what would be the barriers for you to do so?
In Lodz we don’t have parts of the city where there
are
only
children
from
underprivileged
backgrounds.
On average in our city there are only about 3 persons in each class who don’t want
to attend higher education, so it is not a good idea to invite entire classes. This is
also not possible because we organize workshops during weekends or after 4 p.m.
How could you best do it?
I don’t know it. Now we work with the city educational office and school supervisory board (Kuratorium). They inform schools and children. They make
the link between us and countryside schools and we do extra workshops for
these children, which are from families less interested in higher education.
We also contact orphanages and domestic violence shelters. Usually, when
such children come to us once, they come again for another semester. They
want more and more. But we have still only a few percentage of such children.
Primary school students on a campus visit discovering Archaeology with Professor Fluffy
The Educational Opportunities team- at the University of
Liverpool- delivers a range of
programmes across multiple
subjects. STEM disciplines are
a priority but we work with
academics across whole range
of subjects. Young people
have the opportunity to find
out about sociology and literature as well as Biology and
Physics. We work with young
people from 8 years of age in
primary school up to 18 year
olds preparing for entry into
university. Projects can take
the form of sessions in school
and one day visits on campus
to long term intensive projects
over one year and beyond.
ployed
youth
from
an
inner
city
estate