Widening Participation in MSOR / Support for Personal Development Planning and Higher Level Key Skills development

Widening Participation in MSOR by Bill Cox and Penny Bidgood: Mathematics, Statistics and Operational Research (MSOR), like many other subject areas, continues to face the problem of recruiting and educating a more diverse student population. This is fuelled nationally by the Government’s push to wider participation in HE generally and also the need to supply appropriate graduates in industry and commerce and as teachers of mathematics. The MSOR community, as a whole, has had a diverse student intake for some time with its breadth of degrees in the subject area and the differing required qualifications for entry. Recent changes to the A-level structure [3] suggest that the incoming students’ background will become more diverse. Many universities now have specific funds to encourage wider participation and have outreach activities raising the profile of their programmes and also the aspirations of schoolchildren in areas that do not traditionally send people to university. Although it is difficult to gauge how individual subjects fare from these activities, by offering a variety of degree programmes from mathematics as a single honours subject to combined studies programmes and by having a range of entry qualifications, the MSOR community already makes a significant contribution to widening participation…/…Support for Personal Development Planning and Higher Level Key Skills development by John Gillespie: Higher Level Key Skills, with their contribution to Personal Development Planning, are now adding value to PhD programmes in Astrophysics at Durham. To encourage similar developments, the Centre for Developing and Evaluating Lifelong Learning (CD