After one month of our extracurricular research project for Laidlaw, I feel like I have really settled into the rhythm of social science research work and the pattern of the working week, which is exciting given that it was a very new experience to me! I am growing used to the office biscuit tin (disastrous for my healthy new-academic-year resolutions), the regular commute (well, as regular as the British rail system will allow), and the ridiculously capricious weather, which has fluctuated between 20 degree sun and building-flooding storms (where it is, unfortunately, sitting now).

I am also getting to feel more at home the areas we are collaborating with, which has been really enriching on multiple levels. Just a 30 min bus ride from the centre of the town I have lived in for the past year, Blackbird Leys and Littlemore were totally new places to me at the start of this month, but commuting out to south-east Oxford twice a week has seen me slowly getting my bearings of the bus routes and the local shops and landmarks. This was cemented by a tour of the area by a local legend, who showed us incredible community initiatives and stunning areas of natural beauty across his estate. The meal we shared at a local community cafe was undoubtedly my highlight of the programme - the walls were covered with beautiful poetry contributed by locals, and the warm welcome we received from the community leaders we met was incredibly touching, especially given the University’s failures to effectively engage with these communities in the past. We hope to return to the cafe to talk more about the programme’s potential future next week - it is vital to listen to the various needs and understandable concerns of community members, and I really hope that together we can build a relationship and a programme that will fit the needs of students and their wider communities.

In addition to engaging with community members at the cafe, we are reaching out for interviews with representatives from various other stakeholder groups, such as teachers and school board members, extracurricular providers, members of support services, representatives of local businesses, and (hopefully) caregivers of pupils involved in the pilot programme. As authors of the community engagement chapter, we really want to cover a wide scope of opinions on the perceptions of and requirements from extracurriculars in south-east Oxford, which will form an evidence basis alongside our literature review to make recommendations for a future longitudinal study. Setting up these interviews was a big challenge this week, from a combination of busy schedules and my pathological aversion to cold emailing - but we have had some brilliant responses, and are shaping up to have some wide-ranging primary data! I really look forward to the next week of our programme, which will bring another round of extracurricular delivery (following our mythology and rhyme workshops, which we felt went down well!), and another new challenge of conducting and analysing our semi-structured interviews.