Gateways is the University’s flagship pre-16 widening participation programme that supports approximately 1,700 widening participation students across 48 Greater Manchester secondary schools. Through the programme, pupils visit the University annually from Year 7 to Year 11 to gain essential information and advice about higher education, learn more about the subjects they can study at degree level and help create a sense of belonging for the students in a university environment.

Since summer, the Gateways team have been working to recreate the programme that would normally be delivered face to face into a virtual delivery format. What was previously delivered over 60 multi-school visit days will now be delivered through up to 150 virtual, individual-school sessions, fortnightly student ambassador Q&A sessions, and a ‘Student Life’ conference for up to 570 Year 11 students. Currently 29 of the original 48 schools have signed up to take part in the virtual sessions, which is more than anticipated given the challenges that schools are facing with taking part in non-curricular activities. The new offering started with the first event on 7 October on the GoToWebinar platform and since then there have been 12 sessions and two student ambassador Q&A panels, with many more to come during December.

Since starting the new programme the feedback from the teachers has been very positive. For example:

“The timings of the activities were great. The presenter was really clear and explained things extremely well and at the right level for students. I particularly liked the explanation of the Pathways from school to L3 and beyond. This helped bring in discussion about choosing Post-16 options and the importance of considering Post-18 options and researching using UCAS. The time given to explaining, showing clips and students being active was well balanced and worked really well for ours students. Thank you!” – Teacher, Smithills School.

A new website for pupils, teachers and parents has recently been launched. These have been designed to both consolidate the information that students gain from our Gateways sessions and to also provide additional information, advice, guidance and signposting to these students, their parents, and their teachers, who may struggle to find and/or understand other sources of information online.