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The higher education sector is under increasing strain, with thousands of staff facing severance and teams being asked to deliver more with less. In this environment, it becomes difficult to find space for innovation and reflective practice. Impact reports often praise widening access work, but it can be viewed as a distraction from the immediate institutional pressures.

And yet, outreach can be one of the most effective professional development and institutional learning tools available to us. When we avoid judging widening participation activity solely through the lens of student recruitment or commercial return, we move away from market competitiveness and instead can focus on best practice, experimentation and collaboration for greater efficiency. Outreach doesn’t just benefit its participants – the lessons learned can enrich our own work, far beyond just widening access. 

Lesson one: find your internal advocators

Outreach teaches us that visibility is fundamental to our practice. When teams are operating within leaner models, we need to build influence without hierarchy, gathering the trust and support of passionate colleagues. Translating your own work and being your own greatest PR machine internally can raise the profile of work that would otherwise get hidden behind the scenes. Your work may be crucial to the institution, but does anyone realise it? 

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Gaining visibility can become more of a challenge with university colleagues increasingly working from home, and speaking from a large institution with multiple sites, taking a multi-channel approach is vital. One example is going on a “roadshow” (no fancy campaign bus needed!). 

We delivered a “big picture” presentation that highlighted how outreach and our play a role in everybody’s work. It helped fire up colleagues passionate about the same mission and alerted us to work by subject matter experts that could contribute to our outreach portfolio. 

We have also designated access and participation plan facilitators within departments as our consistent advocators. They continue that messaging long after the roadshow, raising support so we can deliver increasing levels of activity with minimal team expansion. Outreach shows us that work made visible is better understood and more likely to gain support. It’s human nature to emotionally invest in stories, and communicating your own and explaining the impact of your work can be a powerful approach to build that visibility.

Lesson two: expand your network

Outreach teaches us that we don’t have to work in isolation. The Office for Students widely recognises the power of collaboration, including . The phrase “it takes a village to raise a child” can apply to all our work. 

A space for shared learning and problem-solving allows us to develop a project from the ground up, crucially with the foundation based on shared experience so it gives the best chance of driving impact from an earlier stage. 

External networks where shared practice can take place don’t have to sit behind a paid membership wall either. Professional associations are fantastic, but require budget – instead, there may be free forums local to you that offer the opportunity to connect with others in the same role at other institutions or organisations. 

Based in the heart of the country, I am fortunate enough to co-lead The WP Forum (Midlands) with three other institutions. Since the pandemic, it’s grown to over 130 members across 33 institutions, all looking to share best practice, as well as trials and tribulations. Each meeting covers a requested theme, such as theory of change, evaluation and belonging, and we scour our membership to identify expertise to share and discuss, helping everyone benefit. 

Forming working groups with like-minded external colleagues enriches our own projects and doesn’t require a large staff development budget to do so. Outreach shows us that collaboration can accelerate our own learning, tapping into external knowledge in ways that working in isolation cannot achieve. 

Lesson three: include your audience

Outreach teaches us the principles of listening to our stakeholders, providing us with clearer strategic direction. Inclusion and supporting a sense of belonging are fundamental to all of our work within higher education, so why wouldn’t we listen to our audience? 

However, listening alone is not enough; we need to actively understand our audience. This means going beyond surface-level engagement and digging into the demographic data of your audience. The power of data can provide a clearer understanding of the challenges they face and help direct the focus of your work. But it is most effective when combined with insight from those with lived experience, such as student ambassadors and the Students’ Union. 

By being aware of the unspoken conventions we take for granted, the hidden curriculum, such as how to engage with academics, decode language and navigate systems, and by truly understanding the intersectionality of our audience, we can design more effective and meaningful work that helps individuals belong, matter and feel empowered. Outreach shows us that reflecting and staying aware of our assumptions, understanding our audience and being open to a critical eye strengthens the impact of our work.

Outreach isn’t simply “that team that goes into schools”. It is a mechanism that, when you delve into some of the principles behind effective outreach, can enrich how we all approach our own work. Visibility, collaboration and active understanding are not just beneficial, but necessary. 

Often, engaging with the institution’s access and participation plan can be the starting point to putting these principles into practice, understanding where we can drive positive change and meaningful impact. Outreach is a space for effective professional development and institutional learning rather than simply delivery. These lessons translate across all areas of our institutions, enriching how we work far beyond outreach alone. 

Oliver Rossetti is outreach manager at Arden University and a co-lead for the WP Midlands Forum, a collaborative best practice network.