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How do we move from measuring retention to nurturing persistence?

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How do we move from measuring retention to nurturing persistence?

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What retention strategies does your institution use?

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What retention strategies does your institution use?

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What role should pre-entry IAG play in shaping student continuation?

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What role should pre-entry IAG play in shaping student continuation?

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What are the hidden costs of continuation — emotional, financial, or social — and how can we mitigate them?

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What are the hidden costs of continuation — emotional, financial, or social — and how can we mitigate them?

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The Universities UK (UUK) Framework for Programme Reviews is designed to help universities in England ensure their courses deliver meaningful value and quality for students, employers, and society. It responds to concerns about “low-value” courses by promoting consistent, transparent, and evidence-based review processes. The framework is built around three pillars: principles guiding how reviews should be conducted, measures including student outcomes, graduate feedback, and societal impact, and transparency through public reporting. Crucially, it emphasizes the importance of student retention as a key indicator of course quality, encouraging institutions to monitor and act on continuation rates to improve student success and progression. By aligning course reviews with broader goals like social mobility, lifelong learning, and economic responsiveness, the framework aims to build public and governmental confidence in higher education provision.

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As part of our commitment to supporting our members in England, we will:

Support members to embed the principles

Share best practice between institutions

Work with stakeholders to consider how we can reflect the changing views of students, graduates and the government.

Carry out an evaluation of how well the framework works

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Framework for programme reviews: ensuring the value of courses

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A framework to support universities in England to identify courses where value or quality might be a problem, and act on it.

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I'm Gem, and I'm a Widening Participation Officer at UEA, supporting mature and commuter students across their educational lifecycle. I completed my master's of research in September 2024, moving into a part-time PhD in October, focussed on the topic of university continuation.

I have lived experience of being a mature student, single parent and commuter in my undergraduate studies, where in my third year, I hit a wall and almost withdrew prior to completion. It was a fantastic member of staff who had words with me, and showed me how to navigate through the last bit. This experience shaped my interest in retention studies, which are currently a bit patchy in the UK, with a focus only on non-continuation for first year students who make it past the first 50-days of study. With the Office for Students (OfS) paying more attention to university governance and metrics, HE institutions may find themselves under fire for losing students due external issues outside of their control. Therefore, I feel it is pragmatic to investigate the need for a new conceptual framework that promotes continuation, provides targeted support and knowledge gathering.

My email address is g.standen@uea.ac.uk if anyone has any questions or would like to discuss my research in more detail.

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HEPI: rethinking retention in the context of UK universities

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HEPI: rethinking retention in the context of UK universities

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Nick Hillman (HEPI's director) is one of the forerunners in conversations around retention. This article provides the most recent picture in relation to policy and HE practice in the UK, and raises some poignant points reflected within my study.

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Harrison's conceptual model of possible selves

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Harrison's conceptual model of possible selves

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This model was adapted to consider continuation instead of accessing HE as illustrated in this image. The journal article is linked here: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/7/10/209.

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This study was underpinned by possible selves as a theoretical framework. This provided a flexible theory that has been applied to several HE related studies, including those relating to accessing HE (Stevenson, 2012; Murphy, 2017; Harrison, 2018; Jones et al., 2022), HE attainment (Leondari, 2007; Clegg and Stevenson, 2009; Stevenson, 2012), and self-regulation (Oyserman et al., 2004; Bak, 2015; Frazier et al., 2021). Possible selves has also been used to explore retention (Delahunty and O’Shea, 2020; Barg et al., 2020) as well as transition from HE into graduate level employment (Papafilippou and Bathmaker, 2019).

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This is the full report from the masters level research undertaken, including full findings, discussion and conclusion.

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The words illustrated in this word cloud reflect answers students provided when asked what three characteristics they feel a university graduate should possess.

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Students were asked to provide three words they would choose to describe sense of belonging. The word cloud illustrates the most used words participants felt resonated when they thought of institutional belonging.