Dr Kerry Traynor, NTF 2025, Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at University of Liverpool
At the 2025 Symposium, I found a warm welcome, constructive critique, and fascinating debates about many challenges facing educators today. I shared recent findings from an interdisciplinary study I’ve led for the last 5 years that explores the role of placements in student outcomes and tackling awarding gaps.
Against a backdrop of ongoing structural inequalities that persistently impact upon the degree awards and graduate outcomes of students from diverse backgrounds, and within an institution seeking to expand placement opportunities, my colleagues and I were keen to understand the role of placement schemes in addressing awarding gaps, and student perspectives on how universities can widen participation in placement programmes.
We formed an interdisciplinary team involving academics and student co-researchers from accountancy and finance, communication and media, enterprise education, educational development, and sociology, as well as professional services colleagues with skills in project management, business intelligence, and careers and employability. We devised a mixed methods approach involving statistical analysis of student records over seven graduating cohorts and student interviews, focus groups and surveys.
The first phase of our findings, published last year in the open access Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education (JLDHE), analysed the sex, ethnicity, disability, POLAR group, grades and degree classifications of 31,159 undergraduates graduating between 2016 and 2023, representing the largest study of its kind to date.
The study revealed some striking findings. While none of us were surprised when analysis confirmed that students completing placement programmes such as Year in Industry (YINI) are significantly more likely to achieve first class and ‘good’ degrees’, what surprised us most was YINI’s positive impact on awarding gaps in relation to all the diversity criteria considered within the study – sex, disability, ethnicity, and socioeconomic group.
The gains were greatest for Asian, Black and mixed ethnicity students, and for students from communities with traditionally low participation in HE, suggesting that enabling more students from these groups to complete YINI could reduce entrenched ethnicity and socioeconomic awarding gaps.
However, the study also found that access to placements is not proportionately distributed – female students, students with disabilities, students from all ethnic minority groups, and students from communities with traditionally low participation in HE are under-represented within the YINI population, suggesting they are either not attempting or are struggling to secure placements.
When we asked students from diverse backgrounds about their experiences of securing placements, they told us about three sets of challenges – informational, practical and psychological – including differing access to placement information and opportunities; perceptions of cost; concerns about visa constraints and employer recruitment practices; and lack of confidence, sense of belonging and positive role models.
These findings have led to many changes in my own institution. We have embedded in our new Learning Framework a commitment to offer all students the opportunity to undertake a work placement and/or study abroad. We have improved online placements guidance, created new careers and internship opportunities specifically for ethnic minority students and those from low participation communities, including 10,000 Black Interns and Equality+, and supported student-led approaches such as our new Women in Business Society. Further changes are planned in alignment with our institutional Race Equality Charter and Athena Swan action plans.
More widely, our findings were cited in a major new QAA resource, ‘Mapping the awarding gap’ in a review informing Australian education policy, and were nominated for JLDHE’s Article of the Year. We expect to publish the second phase of our findings next year and are planning new empirical work in which we explore intersectionality and the impacts of interlocking systems of power such as gender and race on placement participation and degree outcomes.
We are already looking forward to sharing our new findings with the ANTF Symposium in Newcastle next May!
For more information: For more information contact Kerry via K.Traynor@liverpool.ac.uk or on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-kerry-traynor/
