Entry rates vary widely by local authority area

If you’ve had free school meals at school, you are still less likely than your peers to enter higher education.

As the latest report from the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON) explains, the gap between free school meals (FSM) and non-FSM state students for England was 20.2 percentage points in 2021-22. By 2022-23, it was 20.8pp. Both figures are substantially above the 17.5pp participation gap reported back in 2012-13.

And this is very much a regional phenomenon – some local authority areas saw far more concerning increases in this gap over time. Here’s a look at the difference for all local authority areas across a single year.

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And here’s the same data, but you can filter by area and see how things have changed over the years.

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FSM is, obviously, a proxy marker for a wider spectrum of deprivation – and it is not an exact one (the official measure is of eligibility for free school meals, usually calculated via benefit eligibility rules, at any one point during compulsory schooling).

That said, you can see that areas where a low proportion of students with FSM attend higher education tend to be from rural and coastal communities. Westminster was the area with the highest progression rate for FSM students, the lowest was Herefordshire.

Arguably there are other factors, and potentially other deprivation indicators, at play here – but the gap between FSM and non FSM is less easily explicable: Reading has the largest gap (36.9pp) and Westminster the smallest (7.6pp).

NEON notes that changes over time coincide neatly with the end of the main national AimHigher programme in 2011: data shows that progression for FSM students improved when the focus was on area based collaborative outreach. The report notes that the evidence of the impact of collaborative outreach is stronger than ever, despite funding and emphasis on such work being cut as the focus of widening participation activities has shifted to relationships between individual providers and schools.

As a result of what looks like a stagnation in progress on access NEON calls for a new approach to funded work. In particular it wants to see regional targets for progression for providers to align outreach work to, and a dedicated national coordination function. If the government is as keen as we think it to use higher education and higher level skills as a means to address regional inequalities, it may be that a careful analysis of the DfE data (and anomalies NEON highlights) might force radical changes in what feels like a settled access and participation landscape.