Celebration of £1.1 million Q-Step Centre

Dr Julie Scott Jones at the Q-Step celebration event

STAFF and students had the opportunity hear about how MMU’s Q-Step centre has had a positive effect on the local community and given crucial training to the social scientists of tomorrow.

Q-Step provides the opportunity for sociology and criminology students to work with partners including the Manchester United Foundation and Women in Prison where they use quantitative methods to evaluate the success of their projects.

MMU is the only post-92 university to have been awarded funding to become a centre by the Nuffield Foundation, who oversee Q-Step nationally.

As well as helping improve dozens of community projects, our students have also given 1,300 hours of volunteering across the city and received 700 hours of numeracy support from MMU “data buddies”.

Going the extra mile

Sarah Lock, Programme Head of Q-Step at the Nuffield Foundation, said: “We want to make social science more practical. It is well documented that quantitative research skills are in short supply and high demand – the Q=Step programme seeks to address this problem.

“All the centres involved are committed to developing new and exciting ways of training social science students.”

Julie Scott-Jones, Associate Head of Sociology, said: “It’s going really well. We have doubled the number of community partners and in summer we will be reaching out to schools to get involved. The highlight has been seeing how much the students have engaged – that was the big unknown but they have really embraced it.

“When I look round this room I see students that have engaged and gone the extra mile.”

Invaluable opportunity

This will be the first year the Manchester United Foundation have been on board as a Q-Step partner.

A representative for the Foundation said: “We do a lot of work with disengaged youngsters in Manchester both in and out of schools. We felt that our monitoring and evaluation needed to be better to make sure we are doing the best we can, so we saw it as an ideal opportunity for one of the students to come in and see if we are actually doing what we say we do!”

Sociology student Simon Massey has been working with the Criminal Justice Inspectorate in Manchester to look at how black offenders are treated by probation teams in terms of engagement, reporting and reducing reoffending, and how this compares to the treatment of white offenders.

He said: “The work experience has been invaluable – both the professional experience and using the quantitative methods, which is what I want to do after I graduate.”