The Queen's College Record 2020

Reports and College Activities
OUTREACH
Katharine Wiggell
Schools Liaison,
Outreach and
Recruitment Officer
At Queen’s, we want to make sure that we are attracting
applications from the best and brightest students,
regardless of their social or economic background.
The outreach work the College undertakes aims to
help young people – typically from backgrounds not
traditionally significantly represented at Oxford – to
develop the confidence, skills and knowledge they need
to make an application to highly selective universities.
We work with schools from all over the country; however,
through the University’s Regional Outreach Strategy,
Queen’s provides the first point-of-contact for schools
in regions in the North West of England (Cumbria,
Lancashire, Blackpool and Blackburn with Darwen), as
well as the London Boroughs of Lewisham and Sutton.
Most of our outreach work is therefore aimed at students attending state secondary
schools in these areas. Where possible, we prioritise working with those schools
and colleges that have not seen a large number of their students progress to highly
selective universities in recent years. We offer visits to Queen’s, allowing students the
chance to experience life here on day trips or residential programmes, and I also visit
students in their local area to run talks and workshops. We also enjoy collaborating
with others to deliver sustained contact programmes, such as the Lewisham Oxbridge
Programme, which we run in partnership with Lewisham Council and Gonville and
Caius College, Cambridge.
The start of the 2019-20 academic year was busy, with the usual visits to schools
and colleges in our link regions. We focused our provision in Michaelmas term on
working primarily with Sixth Formers: giving ‘Demystifying Oxbridge’ talks to Year 12
students and their supporters and advising them on ways to engage with their subject
throughout the course of the year, and also delivering ‘Admissions Advice’ sessions
to Year 13 students as they prepared to send off UCAS applications and prepped
for their upcoming interviews. We were really pleased to see some familiar faces
when it came to the December admissions round, with students who had attended
the previous Open Days Plus and North West Science Residential being invited for
interview. (Some of them will be starting their studies at Oxford in October 2020!)
Hilary term began with a number of in-house visits from link schools, as well as a
couple of trips to the North West for me, to speak at the Cumbria Student Conference
in Workington and to visit schools in the surrounding area with my Cambridge
counterpart from Fitzwilliam College. Throughout the year, work continued behind
38 The Queen’s College | College Record 2020