Wilko is the Evaluation and Insights Lead who joined the Centre for Equity and Inclusion during summer 2020. His work focuses on designing and developing institutional frameworks to ensure activities and interventions across the student lifecycle are monitored and evaluated effectively at London Met. He further provides advice and guidance to institutional stakeholders in all aspects of data, evaluation and research related work with the aim to drive and nurture an evaluative culture at the institution.
In 2019/20, prior to joining the Centre, he was employed as a researcher and evaluator to produce the evaluation for the long-established Upward Bound intervention. This education programme is London Met’s flagship attainment-raising intervention for secondary school pupils in the Borough of Islington, running now very successful for more than 12 years.
Wilko started working in the higher education sector when he joined London Met in 2014. He quickly developed a strong interest in working within the university environment, combining his passion to help and support students while being engaged in research activities. The opportunity to be involved in a student engagement initiative arose, and he was appointed to co-ordinate and help set up London Met’s PASS Scheme.
From 2015–17, alongside working for the PASS scheme, he joined the REACT (Realising Engagement through Active Culture Transformation) programme, a national HEFCE Catalyst-funded project about student engagement within the UK. Here, he worked as a researcher and consultant as part of a team and worked collaboratively with 12+ partner institutions from the HE sector to advance student engagement practices across the UK.
Since 2017, Wilko has convened a special interest group on research and evaluation for the UK student engagement network RAISE and has also co-published in journals and books.
