Conference Dates and Venue

The HEIR 2025 Conference will be held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, on 4-5 September 2025.

Conference Theme: "Student Access, Retention and Outcomes: harnessing the evidence"

Proposals will explore topics within four main tracks:

• Widening Access - exploring effective ways to boost participation of underrepresented groups and widen equality, diversity and inclusion in HE.

• Supporting Retention - investigating what provision and interventions allow HEIs to support all students during the course of the degree.

• Improving Outcomes - tackling the link between learning and attainment, student experience and employability, within and beyond national policy frameworks.

• Informing Policy - harnessing research and evaluation, and promoting collaborations to bridge institutional practice and HE policy.

Submission Guidelines

We are welcoming proposals for the following presentation formats:

• Research and Evaluation Papers - A 20-30 minute presentation followed by a brief question and answer session. This format is suitable to detail research and evaluation projects that have been completed. The presentations will be generally structured as: (i) introduction and motivation, (ii) discussion of data/evidence and methodology used for the analysis, (iii) discussion of the results and conclusions.

• Lightening Talks - A 5-10 minute presentation that could describe a successful initiative or practice from a case-study, pitch an idea for future research, call for collaborations across institutions, or present preliminary results from work in progress. The aim of these presentations is to spark conversations and develop further work.

• Poster and Pitch - The opportunity to display a poster and pitch its content for 1-2 minute during a bespoke conference session, inviting conference delegates to network over coffee.

UEA Conference Committee

• Prof Fabio Arico (chair) - Director of the UEA Centre for Higher Education Resarch Practice Policy and Scholarship (CHERPPS)
• Prof Helena Gillespie - Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Student Inclusion
• Prof Kay Yeoman - Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education Systems and Technologies
• Dr Kelly Edmunds - Associate Professor in Biology
• Dr Becky Lewis - Associate Professor in Biology
• Dr Ritchie Woodard - Lecturer in Economics
• Mrs Claire Crosthwaite - CHERPPS Coordinator

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to heir.2025@uea.ac.uk.