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New fund to help eliminate UCL BAME awarding gap
2 December 2020
The BAME Awarding Gap Fund will provide intervention projects up to £25,000 each, over a three-year period. Join a Q&A session on 14 December.
A BAME Awarding Gap Fund has been established to provide annual funding for intervention projects aimed at the elimination of awarding gaps between UK domiciled BAME and White undergraduate students.
Staff can bid for up to £25,000 per project over a three-year period, which can be used to buy out staff-time or fund student internships to implement interventions. The funding could also be put towards capital costs (i.e. equipment) or use of external experts (i.e. to deliver training), where these approaches can be shown to be scalable and student-centred.
The first deadline for submissions will be Monday 1 Feb 2021. A second deadline is set for Monday 6 September 2021.
Funded projects will focus on applied interventions which are student centred with measurable outcomes focused on closing the awarding gap. Projects should also be evidence-based, scalable, seek to embed material change for the benefit of future students.
A proposal form and guidance documents with full criteria details will be released shortly.
For more information on project criteria, see the BAME Awarding Gap Fund page.
Potential projects might focus on:
- Enhancing personal tutoring
- Developing and implementing active, collaborative learning approaches
- Redesigning modules/programmes or developing existing modules
More examples of project case studies are available in the Universities UK (2019) #ClosingtheGap report.
Join a Q&A session
The BAME Awarding Gap Fund Steering Group will hold an information session on Monday 14 December, 10am – 11am.
The session will include:
An overview of the fund, including information about the process, funding criteria and how to apply
A talk from Lasana Harris (BAME Awarding Gap Faculty Lead, Brain Sciences) about the development of the ‘The Science of Bias’ module
Q&A
Click for joining details [UCL login required].
About the UCL BAME Awarding Gap Project
The Office of the Vice Provost of Education and Student Affairs (OVPESA) contributed £250k to launch the BAME Awarding Gap Fund as part of a three-year project to address the disparities in outcomes and experience of undergraduate Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) and white students at UCL.
While UCL students, whether white or BAME, tend to perform well above national benchmarks, this discrepancy, known as an awarding gap, has been longstanding across the sector.
A BAME Awarding Gap project team is working with Deans and faculty leads to analyse faculty-specific data and introduce a toolkit of interventions to close the awarding gap.
Find out more about the UCL BAME Awarding Gap Project.