FWRECR16078HEFCE - Formative Evaluation and Capacity Building

We wish to place a tender for a large-scale formative evaluation and capacity building programme that assesses how successfully the National Collaborative Outreach Programme (NCOP) is driving rapid progress towards Government goals to: •double the proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in higher education (HE) by 2020 •increase by 20 percent the number of students in HE from ethnic minority groups •address the under-representation of young men from disadvantaged backgrounds in HE. This tender forms one strand of a larger evaluation programme for NCOP, as set out in the 'Scope' section below.

There are three key elements to this tender as set out below: • An ongoing formative evaluation of the programme between 1 January 2017 and 31 December 2018; Support for local consortia in developing and implementing high quality evaluation plans that utilise robust approaches to evaluation of outreach activity; • systematic review of the evidence emerging from local consortia, in order to inform the formative evaluation itself, and other strands of the NCOP evaluation led by other bodies. Additional information: BIS Research and Evaluation Framework - Lot 3