On Monday, our group attended a talk by former civil servants Catherine Day and Sir Matthew Rycroft, providing us insight into their experiences of leadership within the civil service, and the National Strategy Project, their initiative to promote public engagement in democracy. We also attended a workshop on research method and methodologies to support our drafting of our own methodology.

On Wednesday, we had a group meeting with our Graduate Impact Advisor to recap last week’s meeting with the headteacher of the Cheney school. We discussed the survey data with which our stakeholder had provided us – a survey of student, parent and staff relations with their school and trust across several years – and requested further anonymised data on demographic proportions (Pupil Premium, SEND) and school attendance.

Attending a tour with Uncomfortable Oxford on Thursday highlighted the legacy of colonialism, wealth inequality and discrimination within the university and wider city and sparked many interesting conversations within the group.

On Friday, we decided on our research angle – relational trust and educational inequality within a multi-academy trust – and finalised our research question: what mechanisms do parents/carers and students identify as building or eroding relational trust between disadvantaged families and their school within a multi-academy trust? Subsequently, we arranged a meeting with the director of secondary education at the River Learning Trust to discuss any pre-existing data on educational disadvantage with which they might provide us, as well as the possibility of telephone interviews with students’ parents and carers.

The week concluded with a workshop on designing surveys and interviews for research, which will prove useful for drafting our own telephone interviews. We also attended a talk by Alex Betts, the co-founder of the Oxford SDG Impact Lab, about historical and contemporary inequality in Oxfordshire.

Next week, as well as meeting with our stakeholder, our group will attend a talk by Nabeela Kajee, a medical doctor reading for a DPhil Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, and a workshop on data management and statistics. There will also be an opportunity to catch up with the rest of our cohort during a team building evening at Franco Manca.