Overview: UWE Cares delivers an integrated strategy to welcome and induction with accommodation-based services centred.  The effectiveness of such a ‘whole institution’ approach has been acknowledged by TASO as being key to closing outcome gaps, and underpins the pivotal sharing of data across functional teams critical to coherence of student experience.  

The welcome and induction pathway is purposefully not linearly restricted; relevant students can access the components of the onboarding ‘menu’ from any point of being identified, thanks to the information sharing protocol, and the existence of a multidisciplinary, intersectionality team. 

• Pre-entry, first year students holding contextual offers (includes care experienced and estranged students) can access a free residential 3-day summer school on campus supporting orientation and self-efficacy
• UCAS tickbox students receive advance communication on university accommodation with integrated adjustments like no deposit, no guarantor, and variable check-in expedited on registration
• The integrated UWE Cares/Student Life working enables responsive problem solving that unpick housing (or other) blockers to the transition phase so that pragmatic factors eg physically moving items, can be addressed on a case by case basis at the time of need.  Care experience and estranged students get a ‘front loaded’ exposure to wider student services negating the, evidenced, barrier of students researching such services independently.
• Proactive student finance communications from the team seeks to counter the delays on loan settlement often experienced by this population of students due to the additional evidencing requirements, simultaneous exam pressure, and lack of other informed adult input.  Delays on loan settlement that affect rent instalments are routinely circulated back to the accommodation team to adjust to revised timetables.  

Resourcing:  The UWE Cares team comprises two full time staff and oversees an average student population of 270 (plus carers).  However the whole institution approach enables efficient utilisation of capacity across the university which inherently also provides a degree of resilience in times of constrained budgets.  The interdisciplinary team also provides the institution with a valuable cortex traversing across student characteristics like faith, ethnicity, disability & health conditions, mature, international as well as care experienced/estranged, to channel students fluently to academic provision and student services. 

Monitoring/Evaluation:  The effectiveness of the UWE Cares approach is not isolated to specific interventions due to the usual population barriers, but also as runs contrary to the ‘whole institution’ philosophy.    The university is awaiting the development of reliable national benchmarks to better explore the impact of their cohesive approach.