My name is Sajida Muneer, I'm the principal here at Feversham Girls Secondary Academy. 

It was one of the first state-funded Muslim schools in the country.

Some of our students do very very well academically - they they compete with the highest achieving students across the country 
and they do go on to go to Russell group universities - but on the whole they do tend to stay quite local. 

A lot of reasons boil down to the familiarity, 'it wasn't that different from Bradford'. So we've been thinking for the past number of years 
different ways in which to break down some of those barriers, just because we think there's so much that they have to offer 
other institutions and other parts of the country. When you speak to our girls they feel that somebody who looks like them,
who comes from a background like them, that if they went to University of Oxford they just wouldn't see that.

We were beginning to work on that internally as a school; quite fortunately, the the email came through from BeUNIQ.

It was very timely in terms of a pilot project, starting to work with students when they're 14 and 15 years old:
you've actually got two full years of work before they even begin their post-16 studies.

And the program is called BeUNIQ because we are really, really interested in the students being their true authentic self 
and we want to support them. 

Through the program's bespoke engagement with schools, families, and communities we aim to foster a longterm and sustained impact 
and to widen access to higher education, and in particular to Oxford.

The student ambassadors have had a really big impact because suddenly our students can see themselves in a position that they couldn't see before; 
they're being able to talk to them not just about studies but about life in general at somewhere like the University of Oxford.

There's nothing like actually being able to talk to somebody who's only a few years ahead of you, so they've lived your experience as well 
and you can see how that lived experience could become your lived experience.

The type of person who goes to the University of Oxford is somebody who's very intelligent, academically inquisitive,  wants to learn more 
and specialize more. 

And that's what we have, a school full of students like that - it's just getting them to see that when they when they go there 
they will not be one of very few but actually they'll find like-minded people who want to excel academically and they'll fit right in.

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