Admissions and doctoral access

Dr Rebekah Smith McGloin (Nottingham Trent University) and Professor Julie Sheldon (Liverpool John Moores University) provide an introduction to the EDEPI Project, which is helping to increase access and participation in doctoral education. There are some useful tools and resources, linked below, which have emerged from the work and which are free to access.

Doctoral education sits at the point of connection between work to drive equality of opportunity in access and success in undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes, and efforts to create a fairer, more open and inclusive research culture and community which is more representative of wider UK society.

The Postgraduate Researcher Competency-Based Admissions Framework has been developed as part of the Equity in Doctoral Education through Partnership and Innovation (EDEPI) project, led by Nottingham Trent University in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores and Sheffield Hallam Universities.

In this video, Bukola Oyinloye and Paul Wakeling from YCEDE discuss the use of rubrics and holistic review in doctoral selection and admission. The use of assessment rubrics and criteria for selection which try to assess an applicant’s wider set of PhD-relevant skills is one means to support fairer and more equitable doctoral recruitment.

This paper was developed by the Accomplished Study Programme in Research Excellence (ASPIRE), one of the 13 Research England-funded projects focused on racial equity and widening access to postgraduate study.

Paul Wakeling and Bukola Oyinloye present work led by Lucy Atkinson on identifying and describing existing recruitment and selection equity initiatives within YCEDE universities — with a particular focus on DTP/CDT activities.

This blog post has been written by Tyra Amofah-Akardom and Dami Folayan, both students in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge.