SFC’s report on widening access for 2023–24
David Kernohan is Deputy Editor of Wonkhe
Tags
Access to higher education from deprived backgrounds is a big deal in Scotland.
Although we are still waiting for the Commissioner for Widening Access’s report for 2023–24, we now have the raw data for the year from the Scottish Funding Council. And the news is broadly positive.
The proportion of full-time first degree entrants from SIMD20 areas (the most deprived SIMD quintile) in 2023–24 was 16.7 per cent, up from 16.3 per cent last year and only slightly below the pandemic era peaks. By 2026 the target for this measure is 18 per cent, suggesting that there is still work to be done.
On the more famous of the three Commission on Widening Access Targets (COWA) the plan is that by 2030 20 per cent of higher education entrants (overall) to Scottish institutions should be from the most deprived SIMD quintile: 2023-24 puts us within touching distance at 19.20 per cent.
When you dig in a bit, you can see that it is further education institutions offering HE that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting here – about a quarter of all undergraduate HE is taught in FE, and the proportion entering from a SIMD20 background to these settings was 24.80 per cent.
Scottish vice chancellors and provosts have individual targets too – by 2021 each Scottish university was expected to have 10 per cent of full time first degree entrants each year. Aberdeen, Heriot Watt, and Robert Gordon are still below that proportion in 2023-24.
Some of the pushback on these targets has been that the local area of these providers has a low proportion of SIMD20 area despite instances of serious rural poverty. The resolution of the SIMD data use (a Scottish “Data Zone”, roughly equivalent to Lower Level Super Output Areas at between 400 and 1,200 households – which for sparsely populated rural Scotland can span a wide area covering everything from well-to-do land owners to economically deprived tenants.
The data presented is necessarily incomplete – information on articulation arrangements between FEIs and HEIs is missing due to ongoing issues with the HESA Student collection from which this data is derived.
We do get data on the care experience of entrants (1.9 per cent of full-time first degree entrants had care experience, the highest on record at 620 students), and students with disabilities (22.3 per cent of entrants to full time first degree courses, another record high).
Of course, getting on is as important as getting in – so we get detail of retention for SIMD20 (86.1 per cent continue to year 2), care experience (84.9 per cent) and disabled (88.6 per cent) students. The overall retention rate for those entering in 2022–23 (the latest cohort available) was 89.5 per cent, up 1.5 percentage points on last year’s record low. The report suggests that the cost of living crisis has a disproportionate impact on the retention of SIMD20 students, and the three percentage point increase among these students is worthy of some small celebration given the economic headwinds.