In March 2025, we brought together over 500 life scientists from across the UK and Europe for the inaugural Minoritised Life Scientists (MLS) Future Forum.
Students travelled from institutions including the University of Leicester, Aston University, Birmingham City University and UWE Bristol, whose senior leadership and widening participation teams made deliberate investments to send cohorts of undergraduates and postgraduates.
For many, it was their first time seeing a room full of scientists who looked like them.
Access to networks
We write as members of the steering committee that built this space. Our interest is not in promotion but in a question that should concern everyone responsible for student outcomes: what happens when students from widening participation backgrounds gain access to the networks, role models and employer connections that their more advantaged peers take for granted?
The regulatory backdrop makes this question pressing. The Office for Students (OfS) requires registered providers to meet numerical thresholds under Condition B3, including a 60 per cent progression rate for full-time undergraduates: graduates in professional employment, further study, or other positive outcomes within fifteen months. For many providers, meeting these thresholds requires closing gaps that have proven resistant to conventional interventions.
The House of Commons Library reports that white pupils remain less likely than most ethnic groups to enter higher education, while Black students experience the highest dropout rates and are least likely to achieve a first or 2:1. Meanwhile, graduates from lower socio-economic backgrounds earn 7 per cent less than their peers one year after graduation, a gap that widens to 10 per cent by year five.
The question of internships
These disparities are not primarily about academic preparation. They reflect unequal access to the informal resources that ease transitions into professional life: networks, confidence, credible experience, and the know-how to navigate opaque recruitment processes. The Sutton Trust’s 2025 research on internships is instructive. The gap between working-class and middle-class graduates completing internships has widened to 20 percentage points—up from 12 in 2018. Forty per cent of unpaid interns now rely on family money to fund their placements, and just one in ten internships is found through open advertisement.
For students without the right connections, the route into competitive careers remains partially closed.
University careers services do essential work, but they cannot single-handedly address structural inequalities that accumulate long before students arrive. Access and Participation Plans (APPs) under the OfS framework increasingly require providers to demonstrate what works. The Uni Connect programme, evaluated by Public First and CFE, has shown meaningful effects on higher education participation, but outreach activity rarely extends beyond graduation, when progression outcomes are measured.
Entering mentoring
This is where purpose-built spaces like the MLS Future Forum can play a distinctive role. At the 2025 event, delegates from undergraduate to professorial levels participated in mentoring circles, employer-facing career workshops, and sessions on navigating academic and industry pathways. The mentoring programme pairs early-career scientists with established professionals, addressing a key mechanism identified by systematic reviews of mentoring in higher education: the value of cultural proximity between mentors and mentees for students from underrepresented groups. A review of 73 studies found that mentoring consistently supports career choice and transition behaviours, with benefits when mentors share the identity or background of mentees.
Critically, these spaces do something that traditional provision struggles to scale; they make belonging visible.
For racially minoritised students in STEM disciplines, the absence of visible role models compounds the practical challenges of building professional networks. The Forum’s design—bringing together life scientists at every career stage across institutions—creates, as one delegate put it, “the first time I could imagine a future where people like me lead”.
The evidence
We should be clear about the evidence base. Studies of mentoring show broadly positive effects on career development, but results vary, and the mechanisms remain contested. Research indicates that peer mentoring supports social and academic integration, reduces dropout intentions, and builds confidence, but its effects on academic outcomes, such as grades, are inconsistent. The Forum does not claim to solve progression gaps through a single event. What it offers is concentrated exposure to professional networks, employer insight, and the psychosocial resources that research consistently identifies as protective factors for persistence and success.
The sector’s response to widening participation has often treated access and outcomes as separable problems: get students through the door, then hope the institution carries them forward. The evidence suggests this is insufficient. Students from WP backgrounds need not only academic support but also relational and navigational capital to smooth transitions into employment. Spaces like the MLS Future Forum, which are sector-backed, professionally organised, and deliberately inclusive, provide a complement to institutional provision that deserves serious attention.
Participation
What would it mean for providers to engage with this model? For the higher education institutions that enabled student participation at the 2025 event, this included funding travel and registration for student cohorts, integrating the Forum into employability programming, and tracking outcomes. We are pleased that the aforementioned universities have committed to investing in their students to attend in 2026. These are not trivial expenditures, but they are modest compared with the costs of persistent progression gaps—reputational, regulatory, and human.
Providers developing or refreshing their Access and Participation Plans might consider how to incorporate external forums into progression strategies. Career services might explore partnerships with disciplinary networks that reach students through channels other than institutional ones. Funders and learned societies supporting events such as the Forum might require evaluation frameworks that track participant outcomes over time. Sector bodies might broker connections between regional WP partnerships and national initiatives to build cross-institutional networks.
We do not suggest that forums like ours are a substitute for systemic reform. Unpaid internships remain legal, access to social capital remains unequal, and institutional cultures continue to shape who thrives. Yet in the gap between policy ambition and lived reality, there is space for interventions that work with the grain of what students tell us they need: to be seen, to be connected, and to believe that their futures are possible.
The progression data will follow. In the meantime, universities have the opportunity to invest in spaces that might shift the dial. Not through heroic individual effort, but through collective action that delivers what students from widening participation backgrounds have always deserved: a route in.
Disclosure: The authors are members of the MLS Future Forum Steering Committee.
The members of the MLS Future Steering Committee are Afua Acheampong, Emmanuel Adukwu, Amara Anyogu, Nic Farmer, Oluwadamilola Okekoyin, Shana Owen, Donald Palmer, and Paul Sainsbury.
