This project aimed to boost participation and success rates of students from underrepresented or disadvantaged backgrounds by improving how they are served, especially during the transition into and first year of higher education. Our goal was to build capacity in guidance and support systems through staff and institutions by taking a transnational, practice-based approach focused on transferability. Besides this focus on practice and transferability, we wanted support to move beyond isolated practices to systems. As such we aimed to analyze and map support initiatives exploring how they interconnect and link to other groups and/or initiatives. In third instance, we aimed to strengthen support staff by documenting appraoches, lessons learned and guidelines to evaluate and improve support systems and to involve students as active partners.
Increasingly more students with increasingly more and more diverse needs are entering higher education thanks to changing demographics, policy shifts, and the rise of lifelong, flexible learning. These changes challenge support systems of higher education institutions. Despite efforts, different groups remain underrepresented whether for reasons of gender, ethnic origin, nationality, age, disability, family background, vocational training, geographic location, or earlier educational disadvantage. Once in higher education, students of underrepresented groups or from disadvantaged backgrounds have higher drop-out rates and lower success rates. Practitioners supporting students report needs in three areas: (1) Sharing initiatives with transferability—materials are often inaccessible, lacking context, and not easily applied elsewhere; (2) Involving all stakeholders—students are included in needs analyses but rarely in design or evaluation; and (3) Practitioner-led research—there is a gap in starting from practice and refining approaches based on real-world outcomes.