The COSARAF Foundation has made a £10,000 grant to the Naz Legacy Foundation’s Diversity Days.

The Naz Legacy Foundation, supported by Cosaraf, hosted a trip to St Anne’s College, Oxford and Warwick University in February and March 2022, and Cambridge University in June 2022. All students came from schools with a higher percentage of minority ethnic students. The trip provided the students with a taste of a real university experience and an opportunity to learn about writing competitive applications, advice on funding and scholarship opportunities and a masterclass lecture experience (St Anne’s students had a choice of health data science or history and the students who visited Warwick received an engineering interactive workshop). Both trips also provided a tour of the campus, accommodation information and lunch. The students were able to take part in a question-and-answer session with current University students as part of this experience.

Raising Awareness

Of the Cambridge University trip, 97% of the participants had never been there before.  None of the students had ever visited St Anne’s Oxford or Warwick University before either. Only 33% of the students had visited any other university before this Diversity Day trip. Therefore, for 61% of the students, this was their first-ever trip to a university. 98% of the students felt more informed about university options following the trip.

Interest

A high percentage (63%) of the students were interested in applying to the university that they were visiting before the trip. This figure rose to 94% following the trips, an increase of 31%.  The female students evidenced a greater interest in applying to the university visited than the male students following the trip (interest grew +39% for the female students and +25% for the male students).

Knowledge and Understanding

The students demonstrated that they had learned a range of new knowledge following the university trips.  21% of the students felt that they had learnt more about the number and range of university courses on offer. 19% had learnt about the financial support and scholarship programmes open to them. 18% had learnt more about the daily life of a university student, including information about clubs and societies.

The programme aims to broaden opportunities for young people and provide experiences that can enthuse and inspire young people to feel that they have a place in British society and that they can make a positive contribution. Overall, the Naz Legacy Foundation is working towards helping to create a more equal, fair, and representative UK society, and their most recent Diversity Days clearly evidence this.