Putting students at the heart of everything we do
The University of Brighton is committed to supporting all its students, and to achieving equality of opportunity for all students, irrespective of background. Our new five-year 2020/21 – 2024/25 Access and Participation Plan (APP) outlines the university’s ambition to work to eliminate a number of unexplained differential outcomes based on various student characteristics, over the next 5 to 10 years. The plan sets out our commitment to supporting all students through a range of strategic measures, together with appropriate financial support, designed to help meet our ambitious new targets.
The university has a demonstrable commitment to supporting widening access and student success (see our current Access and Participation Plan) and we will continue to develop our comprehensive programme of work designed to tackle identified differential outcomes. Our Access and Participation Plan, our strategic priority areas expressed in our University Education and Student Experience Strategy, as well as the actions set out in our institutional action plan for the Equality Challenge Unit Race Equality Charter, form part of an institution-wide approach to driving improvements and ensuring long-term change.
The university remains committed to an evidence-based approach to access and participation and regularly monitors and reports on its data in relation to different student characteristics across the student lifecycle. As such our programme of initiatives have already been shown to be having positive impact in closing identified gaps, particularly our work to date on addressing the sector-wide BAME attainment gap issue, see for example, our case-study in the Universities UK Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Student Attainment at UK Universities: #Closing the Gap report. In May 2019, our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Debra Humphris, also signed the joint UUK-NUS Pledge, to work with students and use the UUK-NUS BAME attainment gap framework recommendations within our institution.