We are pleased to offer institutions across Scotland the opportunity to join our project to help monitor the diversity of course reps during the coming academic year.
Establishing the diversity of course reps across Scottish universities and colleges is a valuable piece of work in its own right. Gathering this information is a critical first step in advancing the equality and diversity of student representation – you cannot manage what you don’t measure. It also creates an evidence-base for supporting further activities and initiatives to improve diversity, as well as providing a benchmark against which future activity can be monitored and measured.
In 2017, sparqs began a pilot project with four institutions to monitor the diversity of course representatives. Alongside Advance HE (formerly the Equality Challenge Unit), we created a questionnaire that covered 16 demographic questions. This questionnaire is designed to be administered to course reps at training.
This year, course reps at institutions whose training is delivered by sparqs trainers, will receive the questionnaire as part of their training. In addition, four students’ associations who are not in our AT scheme have also signed up to administer the questionnaire during their own training sessions. The data from the survey will be shared with students’ associations so that they can use this information for their own activities. Over time, sparqs aims to gain a national picture of course rep diversity in Scotland and consider where there may be cross-institutional activity that can take place as a result of findings.
Get involved!
If you would like to be part of the Monitoring the Diversity of Course Reps project for 2020-21 and administer the questionnaire at your own institution, there’s still time to sign up!
To register interest or for more information about the project, please email Megan Brown, Development Consultant, at megan.brown@sparqs.ac.uk.
