St Hugh’s works with external educational charities to reach as many students and teachers as possible. Here are some of our partners.
The Brilliant Club
The Brilliant Club is an award-winning charity that exists to increase the number of pupils from under-represented backgrounds progressing to highly-selective universities. They do this by mobilising the PhD community across the country to share its academic expertise with state schools.
St Hugh’s has been working with The Brilliant Club for over 5 years and in 2018/9, the College welcomed 7 Brilliant Club Scholars Programme launch trips (around 300 students and their teachers).
On launch trips students have their first tutorial with their Brilliant Club tutors, meet current undergraduate students, and have an information session about applying to University with the college Outreach Officer. These day trips offer an opportunity for pupils to have a taste of university life, both academic and social, and encourage them to think about their options.
Universify Education
Universify Education runs a free, year-long programme for Year 10 students from non-selective state schools. The programme offers students the chance to experience life as an undergraduate at a highly-selective university, such as the University of Oxford.
Universify ran their first course in 2016 and partnered with St Hugh’s from 2018. Their programme starts with a week-long residential in August, held at St Hugh’s College. On the summer course students take part in university-style seminars, design their own university, and explore the city of Oxford, discovering what it feels like to be an undergraduate student. During the summer residential students are paired up with Universify coaches, who are current or recent university undergraduates. Students work with their coaches to set goals, work out how they can achieve them, and check-in on progress monthly, via phone or Skype. Students and volunteers all return to St Hugh’s in Easter of Year 11 for a three-day GCSE revision weekend, to help prepare for upcoming exams and to find out what programmes are available once students have completed the Universify course.
Target Oxbridge
Target Oxbridge is a free programme that aims to help black African and Caribbean students, and students of mixed race with black African and Caribbean heritage, increase their chances of getting into the Universities of Oxford or Cambridge (known collectively as Oxbridge). Since launching in 2012, Target Oxbridge has helped 81 students to secure Oxbridge offers.
The programme is open to UK-based students in Year 12 (as well as, in certain circumstances, Year 13). The students accepted onto the programme will be high attainers – they will ideally have achieved, 5 grades at A*, 9, 8 or 7 at GCSE. In the case of students hoping to study Medicine, they will ideally have achieved 8 grades at A*, 9 or 8 at GCSE.
The programme is supported by Oxford colleges and in 2018, it has expanded to 160 participants (across both Oxford and Cambridge), from 45 in 2017. St Hugh’s is funding several places on this year’s programme.