I unfortunately missed the first iteration of my reflections update in week one because I was ill. Getting caught out in the downpour was probably not great!

Over the past few weeks our research has changed significantly in terms of scope. We were first informed that we will no longer be focusing our research on the outcomes of our own deliveries, but on policy relating to extracurricular education (ECE).

We, as such, had to restart our project from the first week, and do our research alongside our original EC programme in schools. This put a lot of strain on us time-wise, and we can see the effects of this in our work - all of our primary data comes from interviews, and reaching out to people on short notice is never a great option; the project's time-frame was already rather short for a policy review, and most definitely for running interviews.

However, we pressed on and were advised to reduce our scope, to only focus on specific elements of policy, making our life slightly easier. We ended up receiving quite a few positive responses, and have a few interviews lined up in the coming two weeks, so not all has been lost! We even found ourselves agreeing to an in-person interview in Bath, making for a fun trip alongside the research being planned by the team.

Furthermore, the students that we delivered our EC programme to have thoroughly enjoyed it, with each of them expressing their disappointment when they learned the club was coming to a close in the next week. I personally enjoyed working in the schools too - it was not something new, as I have worked in schools and with young people in the past, but this particular set of students was rather fun to work with (if a little exhausting!).

When it comes to the research itself, I think I have learned a lot about both our area of enquiry and the process of academic research. I found what we learned interesting and quite eye-opening, from both a national perspective regarding the lack of policy surrounding ECE, and a local perspective due to the stark inequality in Oxford/shire. I am looking forward to writing it all up and presenting a full report alongside other members of my team and the cohort as a whole.

With most of the initial legwork finishing up, my workload is beginning to free up, which is also fantastic. In fact, I have been working on multiple projects alongside the Laidlaw programme, and a lot of milestones have been reached and deadlines met, making me more relieved then I could have imagined.

Overall, I enjoyed experiencing the different aspects of research and collaborative work - I am glad to have been part of the project and worked with so many great people, who I can now call friends.

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On the topic of the research itself:

• We found that no bills have been proposed regarding this.

• We also found no bills about after school clubs or other provisions relevant to our research.

This means that there is no law regarding the provision of ECE.

We resorted to looking for policy recommendations and research papers on the topic of ECE, and found a few interesting sources (with the Social Mobility Commission being the most useful)

They have a few things in common, mainly addressing the following:

• Disparities in the provision of ECE in state and private schools.
• Disparities in uptake of ECE from disadvantaged students - Including location and socioeconomic background.
• Lack of funding for ECE.
• Lack of capacity for schools to deliver ECE.
• Information gaps for where to find ECs.
• Lack of policy regarding ECE.
• We also found that OFSTED uses ECE as a criteria/metric for evaluating schools. 

Using these findings we established some rough areas of enquiry and created a stakeholder list from publicly available information, this includes:

• Policy-level strategic stakeholders (MPs, DfE officials, Education Select Committee Members)

^ Unfortunately, it was difficult to find some of these people due to the change in government (Education Select Committee not appointed and former MPs are difficult to reach), and busy schedules (we had a positive response from the former and current shadow Secretary of State for Education, however his earliest free time was in November. Both the Labour and Conservative party conferences are happening right now too).

• Local government officials (especially for the areas in which we are running our ECs in and those with a remit in education and schools).

• OFSTED (to better understand their role in recommending policy and guidance, and find out how they use ECE as a criteria in their reporting).

• The researchers working on the Social Mobility Network (to ask them to further explain their data and findings - this includes information on further research done about the impacts of socioeconomics and location of the schools on ECE).

We also initially included school-level staff that deliver ECE in schools, or plan its provision on a school or trust level, but found that other groups have already planned to interview these stakeholders as part of their remit. As such, we decided to hold off on interviewing them, and instead (after being consulted by our academic advisor) identified commissioned, operational staff in the local government and external provides of ECs separate from schools as better suited for our research.

We also added members of the Education Policy Institute to our stakeholder list after discovering a useful report.

We will soon be interviewing those who have agreed and shall be formalising our notes from our secondary data into an official literature review that we will use in the final report.