On Monday, our group attended a talk by Nabeela Kajee, a medical doctor reading for a DPhil Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, about inclusive leadership, encouraging us to consider the unique perspective of each team member when making leadership decisions.

On Tuesday, we had a meeting with a stakeholder, Tom Boulter, director of secondary education at the River Learning Trust, who informed us that the trust already has much quantitative data on stakeholders’ relationships with the Trust; we thus discussed the possibility of telephone interviews with students’ parents and careers to gather qualitative data, and concluded that this seems unlikely given the time constraints of the summer holidays, resolving instead to research existing routes via which the Trust reaches students carers, such as surveys and forums. In addition, Tom Boulter provided us with the materials used to train members of staff within the trust about maintaining relationships with disadvantaged families. Rob Pavey, headteacher of the Cheney school with whom we met last week, put us in contact with a member of the school’s data and administrative team, who has agreed to provide us anonymised data on school attendance, Pupil Premium and admissions demographics from 2023-2026.

On Wednesday, we had a group meeting with our Graduate Impact Advisor to recap Tuesday’s meeting with Tom Boulter and divide the workload of conducting the literature review and compiling our methodology. Our team building evening at Franco Manca on Thursday was a much-needed opportunity to connect with other members of the cohort in a more relaxed environment.

This week concluded with a workshop on data management and statistics, which will prove useful for analysing our survey data.

Next week, we will attend a workshop of research poster design and begin writing up the first draft of our research report. There will also be an opportunity to connect with the rest of the cohort during a team building evening at the Oxford SDG Lab’s art club.