Widening participation isn’t finished while background still predicts destination

I grew up in a low-income working-class family, one of six children, eligible for free school meals.

When I was four my dad’s business failed and we became homeless, and I later shared a small council house bedroom with my four sisters.

My dad built me a fold-down desk for my homework, which I sat at every hour before my younger sister’s bedtime, and I took to sitting up late with a small lamp. My studies became a private, almost secret pursuit.

School was marked by not having enough of anything. In primary school my older sister would find me and my brother with a flask of soup, pouring it into the cup-lid so we could take turns drinking our “packed lunch”.

When my mother announced we would be getting Family Income Supplement, I told my class, thrilled that I’d now have a free hot meal every day, and met my teacher’s stony silence, which I took to mean I should be ashamed of my family.

I gradually learned the rules. I learned not to ask about trips we couldn’t afford, and to pretend I didn’t want things. Like lots of working-class children, I became very good at understanding what wasn’t meant for people like us.

A route made visible

When I was almost fourteen, my mother took an Access to Higher Education course. She went on to university and locked herself away to write essays, as I had been doing at my desk, and brimmed with pride when her work came back marked “a 2:1, Hannah!” – which I didn’t understand but guessed must be good, because her smile was so wide.

That changed my life. I already had aspiration – what she gave me was visibility, showing me there was another route, and once something becomes imaginable it can become possible.

In widening participation we often begin the story too late. We talk about applications, personal statements, student finance, and offers, but before any of those matter a young person has to believe that university is somewhere they could belong.

In families where parents or siblings have been to university, that work happens invisibly around the dinner table – which universities suit which subjects, what Russell Group means, how student finance works – and somebody is asking “why wouldn’t you apply?” In another family, school, or community, an equally able young person may be hearing “are you sure that’s realistic?” When nobody at home knows the way, who advocates for the child?

Access isn’t one moment at eighteen. It’s a chain of opportunities and decisions stretching back years, shaping the qualifications taken, the grades achieved and predicted, applications made, and offers received. At every stage, somebody can open the next door or silently close it.

My mother made university visible to me, but school never did. What I remember is being about sixteen and sitting in class while people came in to talk about the opportunities at Sainsbury’s and at the Rover car factory, and thinking “no, I’m not doing that”.

Testing for parity

There’s nothing wrong with working at Sainsbury’s or Rover, or with choosing technical or vocational education. I want pathways of equal prestige that are properly rewarded, but genuine parity requires more than excellent additions to university.

It means working-class children being actively encouraged towards our most selective universities with the same enthusiasm that affluent children are encouraged towards vocational routes. But how will we know when we have achieved this? We cannot establish parity simply by declaring it. There is a far more revealing test – look at who goes where.

We’re living through a moment of renewed enthusiasm for skills and apprenticeships, much of it long overdue, alongside growing scepticism about higher education itself – too many people going, too many “Mickey Mouse” degrees, young people who might be better off doing something else. Every time I hear that, I ask which young people? Widening participation isn’t finished, and at our most selective universities it very definitely isn’t.

The latest Department for Education figures show that just 4.6 per cent of young people eligible for free school meals at fifteen had entered high-tariff higher education by nineteen, against 13.9 per cent of those who weren’t. By school type, 57.9 per cent of independent school students progress to high-tariff universities, against 20.4 per cent from non-selective state schools, which makes this a problem of advantage across the system.

These gaps matter because selective universities offer networks, professions, and economic security. The Institute for Fiscal Studies continues to find substantial lifetime earnings returns for most graduates, even as the Institute of Student Employers finds that starting salaries among its members have fallen in real terms over the past decade. So, I become nervous when we talk as though the access problem is solved.

Who gets permission

Earlier this year I wrote about who gets permission to enjoy their education. Working-class young people are very often asked to be realistic about employability, salary, and return on investment, and for a family without financial security those are important questions. But I’m interested in who has to answer them, and how early.

Nobody sits a pupil down at an expensive independent school at fourteen to ask whether they’ve investigated the job market for classicists. They’re trusted to explore, surrounded by debating, music, drama, and super-curricular programmes that widen rather than narrows choices. Some young people are being cultivated to be curious leaders while others are being trained to be cautious employees.

The same goes for pathways, while an A level student keeps an enormous range of futures open and can change their mind at seventeen, technical education asks for specialisation earlier. That can be brilliant for a young person who knows what they want, but the right to change your mind is itself unequally distributed.

Go into our most expensive independent schools, with their extraordinary progression rates to Oxford, Cambridge, and other high-tariff universities, and ask how many pupils are being encouraged to leave academic education at sixteen, and how many are being told an apprenticeship might suit them better than university. Then ask the same questions in schools serving our most under-resourced communities.

If the answers are very different we have a problem, because a pathway doesn’t become equal simply because policymakers call it equal. If working-class children increasingly populate one route while affluent children populate another, we haven’t abolished an educational hierarchy. We’ve reorganised it, and perhaps given it more respectable language.

Protecting genuine choice

Our job isn’t to get every child to university, and widening participation shouldn’t become recruitment dressed up as social justice. Our responsibility is to protect genuine choice, which takes more than presenting somebody with three options on a PowerPoint slide.

Widening access means providing the infrastructure of opportunity and support that is often invisible in more advantaged households: the knowledge to understand the options, qualifications that haven’t already closed doors, accurate information about finance, and adults who recognise potential and say “Don’t rule yourself out”. This is advocacy.

My own story is easy to tell as a social mobility story, but it isn’t evidence that disadvantaged children succeed through hard work. I was lucky, because at almost exactly the moment my future might have narrowed, my mother opened another door. After she went to university, three of the four children still living at home followed her there. One adult entered higher education and the imagined futures of the children around her changed.

Three questions seem to me worth carrying forward. Whenever we advise a young person, are we expanding their options or managing their aspirations? Would I give the same advice to the child of an affluent professional? And who is advocating for the option this young person can’t yet see? The language of realism sounds responsible and caring, but realism applied differently according to social class is inequality.

Not done yet

I’ll believe we’ve achieved parity when the children of lawyers, doctors, and academics are encouraged towards excellent technical routes with the same enthusiasm as working-class children are, and when children eligible for free school meals are represented at our most selective universities in numbers that reflect their talent.

Until then, somewhere there’s another fourteen-year-old sitting at a desk. She may be growing up in poverty, with nobody in her family having been to university. But she’s curious, she loves learning, and she’s capable of far more than she currently knows.

We should build outstanding apprenticeships for her, and make every additional route prestigious and properly available, without narrowing the university horizons of the very children widening participation was created to serve.

So before we claim those pathways are equal, we should apply the simplest test we have and look at who goes where – and until that picture changes, be bold enough to say we’re not done yet.