The North East Raising Aspiration Partnership is a collaboration of the five universities in the North East of England. Our vision is to improve higher education progression in the region and to ensure that young people in the North East are fully supported to make informed decisions about their future. Working alongside key stakeholders, we focus our outreach activity where added value can be achieved collaboratively. We create targeted and progressive interventions for students currently under-represented in higher education.

• To lead the development of collaborative widening participation and social mobility activity in the region to increase the number of young people applying to and entering higher education.
• To collaborate on widening participation projects which benefit students in the region and support partner institutions’ core aims and objectives.
• To inspire young people from under-represented groups to fully explore all higher education opportunities by providing progressive and/or intensive programmes of support.
• To provide additional capacity for our five partner universities through a programme of joint representation visits in primary and secondary schools which enhances the reputation of the higher education offer in the region.
• To make a measurable difference in young people’s learning, attitudes, knowledge and confidence to progress to higher education among students participating in our core programmes for under-represented groups.
• To set stretching impact targets that enable the Partnership to demonstrate the effectiveness of the collaboration to inform the future direction of this work.

Individually, each university in the region delivers a wide range of programmes and activities to support higher education decision making. Jointly, we coordinate a range of collaborative activities for students in Primary and Secondary education and specific targeted support for underrepresented groups. The Partnership also delivers events for teachers, advisers, parents and carers to support information, advice and guidance given to young people across the region.