What is your current role at the university?
I'm a Lecturer in Materials and Natural Sciences, and the current Director of Natural Sciences, with a 50:50 split position between the Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences (LANS) department and the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, with a home in the School of Metallurgy and Materials. I work with CoachBright in my role as Outreach Lead for LANS.
What do you like about CoachBright’s mission and work?
Widening participation in higher education is something I firmly believe in and is close to my heart. It is a tough goal but one that CoachBright tackles with an admirable, open attitude leading to successful outcomes.
Why did you want to partner with CoachBright?
CoachBright reaches school pupils we simply couldn’t reach by ourselves as a small departmental team. I am impressed with CoachBright’s enthusiasm and the energy their team brings to the table, and I can see how their coaching programme would be a great opportunity for many of our students, as well as for the department’s goal of helping the university’s civic mission by engaging more with local communities.
What does your current partnership with CoachBright involve?
CoachBright provides exclusive training to LANS students to become student coaches. Excitingly, I have also worked with CoachBright to embed a bespoke LANS experience into the coaching programme for students in Years 10 and 12 at two schools in the West Midlands.
Within this, school pupils and LANS students used a framework we developed to work collaboratively, dissecting a complex problem affecting their local communities before coming up with solutions. We gave the pupils a launch event experience on campus before they then returned at the end of the programme to pitch their ideas to a panel of LANS academics and CoachBright staff, who selected the best solutions to receive funding in order to realise their solutions.
What impact have you seen on both the pupils on the CoachBright programmes and your own students?
It was so heartening to see the school pupils use the problem-solving framework to think clearly and critically about complex, and often emotive, topics. Their final presentations showed they had developed some confidence, both in realising the empowering nature of this way of working and in stepping up to present to a large group of their peers, teachers and guest academics.
Our students have come away with their eyes opened to a wider meaning of what higher education is and does, and a greater sense of responsibility. I thank them for their maturity to reflect on these valuable experiences and also thank CoachBright for really helping the students along the way.
Why do you think other universities should partner with CoachBright?
CoachBright offer an easy and successful way of getting your most valuable outreach assets—your students!—to engage with those local audiences that matter most: the younger generation of under-represented communities. For a small amount of effort, you can not only help your department’s/university’s outreach mission, but also provide your students with an invaluable experience and, most importantly, positively influence the lives of young people in your local area.
