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This paper reports findings from a pilot study undertaken at the Lancashire Science Festival to explore the impact of interacting with a scientist on parents’ attitudes towards their child pursuing a career that involves science. Parents were asked a series of questions about their science festival experience and to provide some demographic information. The key finding was that half of the respondents reported that meeting a scientist had made them more likely to think that their child could pursue a career related to science. The attitudinal shift was particularly prevalent amongst parents from low-participation backgrounds. This preliminary finding suggests that interactions between scientists and parents at public science events may offer an avenue by which to foster positive perceptions of science as a career path amongst underrepresented groups.

Science festivals represent powerful and ‘out of the ordinary’ edutainment experiences. They are also highly resource intensive. In a climate where there is concern about science’s declining popularity, they have the significant remit of increasing general public interest both in science and its post-16 study. While organisers often primarily target schoolchildren, it can be just as important to acknowledge parents, who potentially have a vital influence on their children’s interests and behaviours. Consequently, science festival organisers are required to fulfil several operational and legacy agendas. This chapter considers how the organisers of the Lancashire Science Festival balance a range of factors to deliver their annual edutainment experience at the University of Central Lancashire. These factors include multiple resources (notably time, space, and people), cognitive and affective learning outcomes for its attendees, school and family audiences and their associated stakeholders, and its staging at a normally functioning campus setting. The study highlights how specialist organising and evaluation teams, working in combination, design, implement, and review the festival in fine detail and within a process of continuous improvement. The discussions are relevant for not only other science festivals but also other educational institutions which stage, or are considering staging, related edutainment experiences.

The Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education (TASO) has commissioned UCLan to produce the standardised guidance on ethics for field research on widening participation and student success. The resulting guidance offers an overview of ethical considerations that come with various research methods used in that field. The guidance focuses in particular on ethical considerations surrounding the use of experimental and quasi-experimental methods, such as randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and other large-scale quantitative methods, which are novel for many providers, practitioners, and evaluators in the higher education sector. This guidance is designed to support those who work on widening participation and student success in Higher Education (HE). It will help them navigate ethical considerations and deliver best practice in research/evaluation while respecting the rights of participants and minimising any potential harm. The guidance is consistent with the various policies on research integrity that have been agreed upon within UK higher education. It will also support researchers/evaluators working within Higher Education Providers (HEPs) in their interactions with their own Research Ethics Committees (RECs).

Many organisations in the UK work with schools to try to increase numbers of young people from underrepresented groups progressing to higher education. However public debate about the efficacy of these programmes rarely centres the views of schools themselves, often giving the sense that schools are passive recipients of these activities. This study begins to rectify this omission by gathering in-depth information from schoolrepresentatives about their views on, and interactions with, external widening participation providers. We find a number of potential benefits from including schools in the conversation; participants had a range of ideas as to how interventions could be improved and made more impactful, and also pinpointed areas of difficulty, including target pupil selection and quality of some providers’ delivery. Schools expressed a senseof overload in dealing with numerous approaches from external providers, and wished for more access to ‘filter’ mechanisms to provide quality assurance; however some also wished to work more closely with known organisations. It was also notable that none of the schools were working with providers to evaluate the impact of activities. Our findings demonstrate that listening to the voice of the school has the potential to make outreach activities more impactful.

The role of peer and friendship-group conversation in educational and career choices is of great relevance to widening participation (WP) practitioners, but has been little studied in recent years. We interviewed young people and WP practitioners in Carlisle, an isolated city in the UK, to interrogate this subject. We found that young people were clearly discussing their future choices, sometimes overtly and sometimes in ‘unacknowledged conversations’. However some topics and ambitions were seen as ‘too private’ to discuss; all of our young people had a plan for the future, but many believed that some of their friends did not, possibly because of this constraint. We also discuss the role of older students in informing choices, the phenomenon of ‘clustering’ that can lead to young people funnelling into certain options, and the role that geographical isolation might play in exacerbating some effects. Finally we give some recommendations for WP practice based on these findings.

Widening participation in science is a long-held ambition of governments in the UK and elsewhere; however numbers of STEM entrants to university from low-socioeconomic status groups remain persistently low. The authors are conducting a long-term school-based space science intervention with a group of pupils from a very-low-participation area, and studied the science attitudes of the participants at the beginning of the programme. Key findings were that young people from the very-low-SES study cohort were just as interested in science study and science jobs as their peers nationally, and had a pre-existing interest in space science. Some participants, particularly boys, demonstrated a ‘concealed science identity’, in that they perceived themselves as a ‘science person’ but thought that other people did not. Boys tended to score higher on generalised ‘science identity’ measures, but the gender difference disappeared on more ‘realist’ measures. In addition, although participants agreed that it was useful to study science, they had little concrete idea as to why. These findings shed light on how science communicators can best address low-SES groups of young people with the aim of increasing their participation in science education and careers. We conclude that interventions with this group that focus on ‘aspiration raising’ are unlikely to be successful, and instead suggest that activities focus on how young people can see science as a realistic path for their future. It would be helpful for in-school programmes to allow young people an outlet to express their science identity, and to give information about the kinds of jobs that studying science may lead to. Further research into whether the gender split on idealist/realist measures of science identity persists over time would be of use.

Young people's decisions to study post-compulsory science are strongly influenced by the attitude of their parents, but many families, especially those from deprived backgrounds, see science as ‘narrow’ and ‘not for us’. We asked whether family attendance at a science festival — a growing but under-studied activity — could shift attitudes. Our mixed-methods study found parents from more deprived areas were disproportionately likely to say attendance had improved their perception of science. Parents from the most deprived areas were significantly more likely to feel increased positivity about their children pursuing science careers. Participants also reported learning about the breadth of careers in science. However we found no evidence that attendance boosted informal science activity in low-SES families.

Parental attitudes are a key determinant of whether a young person goes on to university, but parents from disadvantaged areas sometimes feel ill-equipped to advise their children. This study looks at whether visiting a university campus for a fun, informal event can alter parents’ feelings of comfort with, and knowledge about, higher education. Using a mixed-methods case study conducted at an English university-based science festival, we found that parents from areas of greater deprivation underwent a more significant positive shift in attitude towards university than those from less deprived areas. We use the concept of ‘ambient information’ to describe the information collected by immersion in a university setting in a neutral context; we found that this information worked to make university seem ‘real’ or ‘achievable’ to parents. We also found that participants gathered knowledge in key areas such as the types of facilities and courses that universities offer. We conclude that informal events on university campuses can have valuable benefits for widening participation. However organisers face the challenge of improving attendance at such events by under-represented groups without impacting on their relaxed nature.

Funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, Blackpool PIER (Physics: Inspire, Engage, Research) is an intensive, three-year longitudinal programme working with a targeted group of young people in an area of high deprivation in the North West of England. The project aims to increase the participants' science capital via a series of interventions including school visits and trips based on astronomy and astrophysics. The work includes a meticulous evaluation strategy to provide a sound evidence base of the efficacy of such interventions, which is benchmarked against results from the UK national ASPIRES survey.