By delivering outreach activities, universities can engage with schools, raise aspirations and widen participation among students from under-represented or disadvantaged backgrounds. However, much university outreach work takes the form of one-off events that rely on goodwill and spare time – making it difficult to sustain over time.
With increasing student numbers and pressure on lab-based projects, we have expanded our research project portfolio beyond the traditional laboratory setting. We now embed school-based outreach directly into undergraduate and master’s research projects. This transforms outreach from an optional activity into assessed, curriculum-aligned work with clear benefits for schools, students and universities.
These projects still require rigorous research design, critical analysis and evidence-based evaluation, but they also open up new, real-world opportunities for learning. Here’s what we have learned so far.
1. The ethics approval process must start early
Ethics approval shapes everything, and it can take longer if your project is high risk, like ours (the classification was given because it involved minors). To prevent delays, identify your institutional ethics body early and understand how your work will be classified.
Aim to submit your research ethics application six months before the pilot. This means you will need to prepare a detailed research proposal, participant information sheets, parental consent forms, invitation letters and data collection tools (for example, survey questions or focus group topic guides).
This stage forces clarity on key questions:
- Who are your participants?
- What educational outreach activities are you aiming to run?
- Are you collecting anonymised data only?
- Does your project fall within the scope of data protection legislation?
2. Staff within your university can help with relationship building
Establishing a relationship with a school can be difficult but it does not have to rely on personal contacts. If available, reach out to your schools’ engagement team or widening participation office; they act as brokers between academic departments and local schools.
Approach them with a clear proposal, including the topics you could teach, the intended format (for example, A-level‑aligned sessions) and the anticipated time commitment. This level of specificity will help them identify a suitable partner school and streamline the introduction.
Once connected, the most important relationship is with the classroom teacher. Find out which areas they need support in and how your sessions can supplement – not interrupt – their delivery and agree on a list of topics and dates, along with the full set of activities for the final project. Treat the school as a co‑designer rather than a recipient – this guarantees that sessions are aligned with the existing curriculum and timetable and avoids producing engaging but disconnected “one‑off” experiences.
- Outreach programmes that lay STEM pathways and strengthen research skills
- Why one-way university outreach falls short
- Spotlight guide: The secrets of successful university outreach
3. Piloting with students is critical
A pilot will allow you to test the approach in a low‑risk context. Establish a student-staff partnership from the outset that will enable you to design educationally robust and feasible approaches.
In our case, running a pilot allowed us to:
- identify and test approaches for co‑designing teaching materials that were explicitly mapped to curriculum goals
- develop and refine structured rehearsal strategies, supporting students to build confidence and the presentation skills needed to communicate complex ideas clearly to non‑specialist audiences
- deliver a practice teaching session to evaluate different teaching formats, while observing pupil engagement and identifying practical classroom constraints such as space, timing and available resources.
4. Our approach is transferable
Once refined, you can adapt and scale by embedding the model within any undergraduate or postgraduate research projects module. At this stage, students must frame their teaching explicitly through the lens of their discipline. For example, a biomedical student might teach basic genetics through clinical case studies, while an engineering student might frame physics principles through technological applications.
Digital tools and online resources can help students adapt materials for different audiences and accessibility needs. This will allow them to focus their time on higher‑order tasks such as refining narratives, rehearsing delivery and developing interactive elements that enhance engagement and make learning memorable and enjoyable.
5. Outreach should be part of the research, not just the delivery
Our approach calls for a shift from treating outreach as just a teaching activity to treating it as a research process. This means combining systematic data collection with careful documentation of how the intervention is designed, delivered and experienced.
In practice, this includes collecting data from pupils and teachers before and after sessions, such as changes in confidence, understanding and engagement. These measures provide the core dataset for the dissertation and allow students to evaluate impact in a structured, evidence‑based way.
However, rigorous data collection alone is not enough. The development of teaching materials must also be treated as part of the research to explain why the outreach was effective. Students should describe in their methods how they created theirs, adapted content to the audience and made pedagogical decisions in response to classroom realities.
Equally, student mentors should analyse the skills they develop during the process in the results and discussion sections. Teaching in schools requires students to communicate complex ideas clearly, respond to questions in real time and work collaboratively – skills that are rarely captured in traditional dissertations. Structured reflection can provide a gateway for this.
Outreach that works both ways
Embedding outreach into research projects changes its institutional position. Instead of relying on voluntary activity at the margins of university life, outreach becomes part of how students learn, research and apply disciplinary knowledge in real-world contexts.
Nephtali Marina-Gonzalez is the vice-dean of equality, diversity and inclusion in the Faculty of Medical Sciences at UCL.
If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.
comment