For the final class of the TPP unit we received a guest lecture from Jheni Arboine and Siobhan Clay on looking at data – specifically looking at the attainment gaps within UAL students over the past few years.
Banerjee and Eryilmaz say that “the data consistently reveals that Black students are less likely to receive higher degree classifications when compared to their White counterparts” (2024) – revealing that it is sector wide and not just specific to UAL. This ‘longstanding gap’ (Gutman and Younas, 2024) seems ‘unexplained’ (ibid), but Singh (2009) puts forth that it could be down to a lack of teacher support, and those teachers having lower expectations of students of minority ethnicities and therefore under-challenging them.
Looking to the UAL statistics (where the attainment gap between black and white home students has increased over the past few years) there are clearly things to be done – putting a focus on improving the attainment gaps means delving into the specific help that may be needed for students of non white ethnic background that they are currently not getting. Gutman and Younas mention “the importance of adopting holistic, intersectional and exploratory approaches that are solution-focused” (2024), and I believe this is where my role could begin to feed into helping this.
Art school mark schemes are designed to eliminate the taste of the marker, and instead focus on awarding points for the students discovery, idea, process and development of the body of work. This type of experimentation and process development and very easily be evidenced by learning technical processes, and documenting this. In the workshops like where I am based we are in a prime position to help students with experimentation and skill acquisition, which is crucial when it contributes to their mark and could therefore influence attainment.
However, unlike courses who receive the type of detailed statistics on their specific attainment gaps broken down by categories such as race, gender, disability status – in technical we have no access to this level of specificity in our attendance rates. It is hard to solve a problem when we don’t know the stats we need to fix. There could be things we are unaware of influencing access to our workshop – eg could the traditional image of 3D making and woodworking as a very male dominated field be offputting to female students? Could the complex 3D related technical terms seem too overwhelming to students with English as a second language?
I think that allowing technical teams to access statistics in the same way that academic teams can could allow us to see if there is anything we can do to combat access related issues to our workshops. With technical access being integrated into the academic solution to closing the attainment gap we could see a higher portion of students being able to get the top marks for the development, experimentation and skill acquisition parts of their assessed unit projects, as well as providing more students with the opportunity to fall in love with the world class facilities we have available for them.
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References:
Banerjee, P. and Eryilmaz, N. (2024) ‘Undergraduate Achievement Disparities between Demographic Subgroups in English Universities’, trends in higher education. Available at: https://www.mdpi.com/2813-4346/3/3/31? (Accessed: 19 March 2025).
Gutman, L.M. and Younas, F. (2024) Understanding the awarding gap through the lived experiences of minority ethnic students: An intersectional approach [Preprint]. Available at: https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/berj.4108? (Accessed: 19 March 2025).
Singh, G. (2009) A synthesis of research evidence. Black and minority ethnic (BME) students’ participation in higher education: improving retention and success. [Preprint]. Available at: https://s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/hea/private/bme_synthesis_final_1568036653.pdf (Accessed: 19 March 2025).
UAL statistics viewed on a variety of pages on Active Dashboards. Available at: https://dashboards.arts.ac.uk/dashboard/ActiveDashboards/DashboardPage.aspx?dashboardid=99b2fe03-d417-45d3-bea9-1a65ebc250ea&dashcontextid=637169217954162575 (Accessed: 19 March 2025)