King's College London

Black students experience lower attainment in key engineering subjects of maths and physics than their white counterparts and are less likely to achieve a 2:1 or 1st-class degree outcome.

Success for Black Students builds on a successful existing initiative at King’s, Success for Black Engineers, which is designed to support aspiring Black engineering students at school and university with tutoring, outreach workshops, a mentoring scheme, events, trips and placements .

The initial pilot, co-created with Black engineering students and seed-funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering , has had a positive impact within King’s Department of Engineering and School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences. Evaluation data has shown that Black students have benefitted from the programme by gaining insight into engineering careers, advice on applying for engineering study programmes, confidence and reassurance, role models, research skills and experience and developing relationships with peers and academics.

This next phase of support scales up the project to include the Department of Physics. The project aims to address unequal outcomes by providing students with peer, academic and industry mentoring, a series of informational and social events, an insight day in industry, and summer research placements. Through collaboration with Black physics community organisations, schools and current students the project aims to identify the support needed for aspiring Black physics students in school. This will include piloting a physics outreach activity for Black school pupils in summer 2025.

"We are delighted to have received One King's Impact funding to scale up our support for Black students at school and university beyond Engineering to include Physics. We believe this project will provide a blueprint for inclusion initiatives across King’s and in other institutions which will ultimately help tackle the awarding gap and underrepresentation of Black students. Being awarded this funding shows that King’s values the work that we are doing and sees the impact it can have." - Professor Kawal Rhode, Professor in Biomedical Engineering and the Head of Education at the School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences

Partners and Collaborators

A network of multidisciplinary partners from across and beyond King's are working together to maximise the impact of the project.

Find out more about the project partners:

• King's Department of Engineering
• King's Department of Physics
• King's School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences
• Ansys Black Employee Network
• Siemens Healthineers
• SiSTEM
• Black physicist community organisations
• PhD student and academic mentors