Project title: Socio-economic equality and mentoring, support and outreach
Project summary:
The Strathclyde Engineering Scholars program is a mentoring, support, and outreach initiative designed to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds access and succeed in engineering education, ultimately leading to professional graduate employment. The need for the program was identified through internal research, which showed that students from disadvantaged backgrounds in chemical engineering at the University of Strathclyde had lower completion rates compared to the overall graduation rate. This finding is consistent with broader UK research, such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies report, which highlights that students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to drop out, graduate with lower classifications, and have lower aspirations to pursue higher education.
The Strathclyde Engineering Scholars programme
The Strathclyde Engineering Scholars programme was designed as a replicable model to transform outcomes for students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Its scalability is largely dependent on the recruitment of tutors and available funding. The strong demand for the programme is evident, with 335 applications for 182 places.
The programme has established effective practices, procedures, and resources that can be easily adopted by other Higher Education institutions. These resources include a comprehensive tutoring training package for maths and physics, developed by Strathclyde’s Institute of Education; best practices for recruiting undergraduate tutors and mentors, including a credit-bearing module that helps tutors demonstrate transferable skills; a portfolio of student-led engineering outreach events; and guidance on effective student tutoring, mentoring, and industry engagement. Additionally, the programme provides recommendations for organizing on-campus celebration events.
The full report can be found and read here on the Strathclyde website.