Fair access and unintended consequences

The supposed unintended consequence of Scotland’s fair access targets is that well-off students are getting squeezed out. This is often accompanied by media coverage of access to certain institutions and certain subjects (especially law).

As a reminder, the headline objective is, by 2030, 20 per cent of full-time first degree entrants to universities will come from the most deprived 20 per cent of areas, as measured by the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.

According to The Times this week, Commissioner for Fair Access John McKendrick let the cat out of the bag in his written evidence to the Holyrood education committee, “admitting” that this target is leading to students with stellar high school grades being frozen out.

But he told the committee this was a misrepresentation:

The article – mistakenly – asserts that I ‘admitted widening access to deprived pupils on lower grades would mean more middle and upper-class pupils locked out of university, including some with stellar grades at high school.’

Now I’ve had an exchange with the Scottish editor, a very constructive exchange, but I have to emphasise to the committee I did not recognise these words and I do not concur with the message.

What he actually wrote was (p.29):

It is inevitable that if the goal of fair access is to increase the proportion of entrants from one group (i.e., those from the 20 per cent most deprived areas), then the consequence will be to reduce the proportion of entrants from some other groups.

It’s depressing that a statement that essentially asserts that percentages must sum to 100 has become a political minefield. On Wonkhe Jim’s written several times (most recently here) about how this debate over proportions has been dodged but not solved in England – in Scotland’s planned system it’s more acute, and not helped by sensationalist press coverage.

Away from the headlines, the more interesting debate around “unintended consequences” and the fair access targets relates to the interplay between Scotland’s universities and colleges.

As McKendrick said:

Colleges have expressed some concerns that universities have been so focused on meeting their targets that they’re keener to get pupils in earlier… and that for some who leave school, the right place for them after school is college. Either full stop: a college education is of value in and of its own right… or perhaps the right pathway to higher education is to enter it through college.

UHI’s Lydia Rohmer, representing Colleges Scotland, echoed this later in the hearing, saying that post-pandemic there had been times when “universities were very much recruiting learners that traditionally would have come to college first.” She went on to refer to anecdotal evidence of “whole college cohorts collapsing in Clearing.”

Data from the Scottish Funding Council yesterday also highlighted the declines in higher education provision at Scotland’s colleges that the last decade has brought – full time participation in 2023–24 saw yet another fall, down to 25,772 full-time equivalent students. This compares to almost 35,000 FTE ten years previously. Part-time higher education participation in colleges has also slowly fallen.

Now there are labour market trends here too, as Rohmer explained. It’s far from the case that we can comfortably conclude fair access targets have had an overall negative impact on college HE participation – but this is the kind of issue that a tertiary lens on widening access would be able to speak to.

The Scottish government, however, rejected John McKendrick’s suggestion that the commissioner’s remit be expanded to cover all of the tertiary sector (recommendation six in his first annual report – the second is due in late March).

Elsewhere there looked to be cause for cautious optimism around achieving the interim target for 2026, based on more recent UCAS end-of-cycle data (as I wrote about here) as well as 2025 January deadline figures – both suggest upticks in SIMD20 participation.

While we haven’t had official confirmation that the government will accept his first report’s notable suggestion to remove institutional SIMD targets, you would think it must be a done deal. It’s hard to support area-based measures for individual universities when your own commissioner is clear that they just don’t work:

From the very outset, the institutions in the north east and to some extent Scotland’s Rural College were never able to meet the target, and the institutions in central Scotland will always meet the target, just simply by virtue of where they are.

The wider picture around access still looks fraught – various witnesses cited this week’s school leaver statistics as demonstrating how there is only so much universities can do, a point Universities Scotland stressed in their evidence as well. But McKendrick detected “renewed energy and sense of purpose,” and was commendably clear that hitting the interim target was less important than making progress towards a better system.

The fact that Holyrood is still taking an interest is heartening too, especially if you compare the quality and breadth of debate and written submissions (and the fantastically comprehensive briefing that the Scottish Parliament Information Centre put together) with the complete lack of HE-relevant matters on the Westminster education committee’s roster. Other issues flagged by attendees and respondents for the committee to take into account included the absence of part-time students in current metrics, the challenges faced by disabled students, and the need to consider outcomes as well as entry rates in the access agenda.