Farooq Sabri

We report the results of a pilot study to test the impact of a short talk on pupils' stated intentions to attend university. In this study, conducted over a single day in a single school, we test first the effect of mentoring vs no mentoring, and a variation in the form of the mentoring. We find increases in stated likelihood of applying to both university in general (0.8s.d.) and the University of Bristol particularly (0.0s.d.). We find no impact of varying the length of the talk.

We report the results of a pilot study to test the impact of a short talk on pupils' stated intentions to attend university. In this study, conducted over a single day in a single school, we test first the effect of mentoring vs no mentoring, and a variation in the form of the mentoring. We find increases in stated likelihood of applying to both university in general (0.8s.d.) and the University of Bristol particularly (0.0s.d.). We find no impact of varying the length of the talk.

With budgets tightening across the charity sector, it is helpful to test whether services are actually helping beneficiaries by measuring their impact. Robust evaluation means assessing whether programmes have made a difference over and above what would have happened without them. This is known as the ‘counterfactual’. Obviously we can only estimate this difference. The best way to do so is to find a control or comparison group of people who have similar characteristics to the service users, the only difference being that they did not receive the intervention in question.