Key Contact Role

If you have been identified as the key contact for ASPIRENorth staff in your school you will be involved in the following activities:

Selecting the Cohort

ASPIRENorth works with cohorts of 15-20 pupils in each year group from S3-6. It is expected that those pupils who become part of the ASPIRENorth group in S3 will work with us through to S6 with some flexibility for other pupils to join depending on circumstances.

Getting the right pupils from your school involved in our activities is extremely important. If you are involved in selecting or encouraging pupils to go on ASPIRENorth activities, please refer to the guidelines detailed below:

Pupils who are well on track to gain entry to Higher Education and likely to progress without additional help do not form part of our target group. We are seeking to make a real difference to pupils who you know have the potential to achieve Higher Education entry but who are falling short of realising this potential.
Our core criterion is:

In selecting pupils staff should also take into account any economic, social or cultural factors which may impact on a pupil’s likelihood to realise their potential. Those selected should be the pupils who you know would particularly benefit from all or some of the following:

• Having positive adult role models and support from their peer group to progress to Higher Education. This may be particularly useful for pupils with little or no family experience of Higher Education and who are first generation in their family to apply to Higher Education.
• Working in a small group environment with one-to-one support to develop pupils’ awareness of their own personal skills and attributes thus developing confidence and preparedness for Higher Education.
• Enhanced opportunities to visit college and university to help explore the realities of Higher Education and gain a first-hand experience of student life.
• The opportunity to seek advice on practical issues relating to student life such as funding & finance, sources of support at college and university, study skills and exam techniques.
• An added ‘boost’ to keep motivation and attainment levels on track.

Planning meeting

This meeting will take place in school prior to or straight after the summer holidays with the ASPIRENorth Regional Co-ordinator for your area. At this meeting dates will be agreed for ASPIRENorth activities for the coming school year. This will also be an opportunity for you to provide feedback to ASPIRENorth on their activities and to inform us of any developments in school which may impact on our activities.

Pupil data

We would also like to have basic information on the pupils who will be attending our activities.  This will allow us to monitor pupil attendance and track their progress over time.  This is extremely important in assessing the effectiveness and impact of the project’s activities.  Many schools have found that their schools record system is able to export this information so it can be sent to us. As the key contact the request for this data will be sent to you for completion.

Any personal data we request will be to administer pupils' participatiion on the programme and this will be used solely for that purpose. We are also obliged to provide the Scottish Funding Council information on what participating pupils do after they leave school. Therefore participants names, dates of birth and school will be passed to a third party (Skills Development Scotland) who will use this data to provide us with this information. For the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998, The University of Aberdeen is identified as the Data Controller.

Arranging staff cover & accommodation

ASPIRENorth activities take place both in and out of school. For in school activities suitable accommodation is needed; we would also like to access outdoor space for team building activities. As the key contact we will require you to ensure that this accommodation is arranged prior to our visit. For any out of schoool activities we will discuss with you the required ratio of staff to pupils to ensure this is maintained.

Evaluation forms & Teacher Focus Groups

As part of ASPIRENorth's evaluation strategy we will occasionally require feedback from pupils and teachers on our activities. Our key benchmark questionnaire will be set in school using our Personal Response System so will not require teacher input, however our partner institutions may want to gather evaluative comments on the success of campus visits etc. We would also welcome qualitative feedback from our key contact teachers to measure the success of our programme and respond to need.

ASPIRENorth Sub-Committee Groups

The ASPIRENorth Sub-Committee Groups for the Highlands & Islands and Grampian/Moray were set up to guide the work of the programme, offer feedback and shape the direction of work. All key contacts are encouraged to become members of the sub-committe who meet four times a year.