Laurence wants to be a set designer. He thinks he would be good at it; he can imagine coming up with lighting concepts and constructing the architecture that will bring scenes to life. The problem is, Laurence has no idea if such a path is open to him. He hasn’t spotted many people from black and minority-ethnic (BAME) groups on stage in the productions he has been to see - and that suggests there probably aren’t a lot of people from his community working backstage, either.

This was an issue that Isolde Walker, a lecturer at Bedford College, and Bex Foskett, who works for Bedford Creative Arts, were keen to address with their Backstage Absences project - just one of five research projects that Bedford College Group has funded recently as part of its college improvement research projects (Chirps) scheme.

Chirps was developed as a way to support college staff to take part in educational research, with a view to improving teaching practice and informing college policy.

We decided to ring-fence £10,000 from our CPD budget to support research projects led by staff. All staff were invited to bid for pots of money between £500 and £2,000. And it didn’t take long for the bids to start rolling in.

How did the scheme work? We asked applicants to submit an overview setting out the aims of their project, a methodology, ethical considerations and their plan for expenditure. In signing up for the project, participants agreed to undertake the research on behalf of the college and to then share that work with the wider college group. All staff working on a research project would receive supervision from a colleague undertaking a PhD.

From all the bids we received, the leadership selected five projects to fund, each of which received £2,000. The five projects were: helping foundation maths learners to gain a better sense of numbers through the use of manipulatives; making the learning environment more relevant to millennials by promoting the use of apps both within and outside of the classroom; developing a college YouTube channel to support and promote the use of information learning technologies in the classroom; investigating how to tackle the barriers of time, training and confidence when it comes to utilising technology in education; and Backstage Absences, which aimed to improve the diversity of the production arts course by creating a more student-led curriculum.

“The [Backstage Absences] project was created in response to the lack of ethnic diversity that we witnessed in our own theatre careers,” says Walker, who worked as a costume supervisor before becoming an associate lecturer at Bedford College.

“The project aims to discover the attitudes of young people from different ethnicities when it comes to careers in backstage theatre roles - with a view to improving the diversity of the college’s cohort through improved recruitment or curriculum development.”

Walker and Foskett plan to deliver workshops to Year 9, 10 and 11 students, introducing them to the backstage careers available through a combination of discussion and practical exercises.

Mark Tinney, a teacher and teacher trainer at Tresham College of Further and Higher Education, is heading up another of the selected projects. He is investigating whether staff would make use of an open-access YouTube channel dedicated to training on the use of technology in the classroom.

“I set out on this project to see, first of all, which barriers staff felt they faced in using technology in the classroom and then whether they would access and find use in a YouTube channel to support their training and development,” Tinney explains.

This January, he launched the BCG (Bedford College Group) Teacher Tech channel on YouTube with four videos. Four months later, the channel had gained 43 subscribers and had more than 539 views.

“Responses to the accompanying survey are still somewhat limited but, so far, most staff have highlighted that time and access to equipment are their biggest barriers, and all respondents have said they feel the channel will help them improve their use of technology in teaching and learning,” says Tinney.

“I am still hoping to gather more data on the project and the use of the channel is still growing, but the initial results clearly show that there is a ‘market’ for the channel and that continuing to develop and add content will benefit teachers across the group.”

Tinney’s results have been encouraging so far. However, in practice, it has not always been easy to get individual research projects off the ground. Foskett and Walker had planned to deliver their workshops to secondary students in July, but the outbreak of the coronavirus has unfortunately put a temporary halt to their research.

“The work is planned to go ahead with local schools and charities once we understand what opportunities there are after lockdown ends,” says Foskett.

At a leadership level, structural issues have also posed problems for Chirps. Making one-off payments was tricky, for example, as we hadn’t run projects like this before.

The greatest challenge of all, though, has surprisingly not been the coronavirus outbreak (although, admittedly, this has limited the data sets collected by some projects), but time. We had feedback that some researchers struggled to measure the time they spent on professional development around teaching requirements and struggled to find the time to meet supervisors and others involved in the project. This is an issue that we are looking to address.

Do the challenges outweigh the benefits, then? Not at all. Despite having structural issues and a global pandemic to contend with, staff ’s ongoing commitment to the project indicates the benefit of developing practice through research and their desire to effect change in the college.

As for how successful the Chirps programme has been overall, this is hard to measure, as the research projects are still being completed. However, the impact and confidence it has given the lecturers is already clear to see.

For Jamie Heywood, course manager for teacher education and social sciences, who is conducting research on how best to tackle barriers to using technology in education, taking part in the Chirps project has given him the confidence to apply for a part-time PhD in October 2020.

“It’s been fantastic that the college has championed research in this format. My research skills have developed as a result of being involved,” he says. “I have felt supported by my supervisor throughout the process and have begun to examine a topic that is close to my professional practice and will hopefully be able to influence the college on a wider basis.”

The coronavirus outbreak might have put a dampener on the research, but there is clearly still plenty here worth pursuing. The initiative has demonstrated the potential for an FE college to lead and develop its own research and then use that research to change practice.

To build on the project, our next challenge is to develop and embed mechanisms to ensure that the work of the research teams really does go on to inform college decision making. Giving staff the opportunity to share with other practitioners is vital, but we recognise that most colleges don’t change from the ground up, and so it is also essential that we share and store the work more widely so that it can become part of the decision-making landscape in the college. This is crucial for any other college looking to introduce something similar.

I’d also stress the need to make sure that the projects are well led, and the outcomes are rigorous. Of equal importance is that staff are properly remunerated and that senior management buy-in is secured.

But perhaps the most crucial element of a scheme such as Chirps is that the project leaders have confidence in themselves and each other. College leaders can help here by modelling that confidence - making it clear that they have faith in the abilities of their staff to influence the college at a profound level, through incisive and effective research.

Sam Jones is an advanced practitioner, and research and scholarship lead at Bedford College Group

This article originally appeared in the 26 June 2020 issue under the headline “The college that’s bringing change from the inside”