Have 25 years of widening access made a difference?
David Kernohan is Deputy Editor of Wonkhe
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There’s not a lot of stuff out there that uses a data time series that goes back more than 25 years.
Off the top of my head I can think of the chart I do at the end of my annual HESA Finance pieces – the product of a day of painstakingly assigning UKPRN codes to HESA archive data.
Outside of that, you see long datasets where they should be – in the research literature. But today brings a new Sutton Trust report that plots getting on for three decades of data on access and participation in higher education. And it is fascinating.
The time period in question has seen initiative meant to drive equality of opportunity via access and participation come and go. From the early HEFCE work, through the Office for Fair Access, into both the Chris Millward and John Blake eras at the Office for Students, the shift has been away from an outcomes focus (the numbers of disadvantaged students that end up at university) and towards a greater attention to inputs (what universities are doing to drive aspiration, access, and success).
On that spectrum, 25 years of university access is an old fashioned report. The focus is on raw numbers, the end point of any access intervention but something that recent years have seen regulators become increasingly squeamish about. And you can see why. Famously the first published work of the Sutton Trust identified 3,000 “missing” state school students at selective universities – this update found 4,700 who had the grades to attend somewhere selective but did not.
If we look at this finding proportionally, it is exactly where you would expect it to be – almost as if decades of concerted effort at all levels had achieved nothing. In the words of the Sutton Trust:
Widening participation efforts appear to have been a case of ‘running to stand still’
Under the hood things aren’t quite so bleak. The effect has been an entry rate increase for POLAR4 quintile 1 (the least likely group of young people to attend university) from 11 per cent to 24 per cent since 2006 – an impressive achievement slightly marred by the growth from 40 to 50 per cent for POLAR4 quintile 5 over the same period. As POLAR4 Q5 is more likely to apply to university, the impact is the impression of stasis.
If you look at just Russell Group entry by POLAR4 Q1, this has shifted from 5 per cent in 1997 to 7.5 per cent in 2020, far below the sector average proportion.
More selective universities actually fell further behind the sector average for access from low participation neighbourhoods in between the turn of the century and 2011 – there’s been some recovery since then, but we’ve yet to return to the glory days of the late 90 when the average for the top 30 was more than 55 per cent of the sector average. At least participation from state schools has risen over that period (now nearly at 85 per cent of the sector average).
As the report concludes:
While differences in access are in large part down to differences in attainment between groups, as the “missing” student figures here show, there are also differences in access even after taking into account differences in prior attainment. There is clearly more that universities, especially the most selective, could do to attract and admit students from disadvantaged backgrounds who already have the grades needed for entry.
Big chunks of the solution to this inequality lie in improving attainment at compulsory level – and it is heartening that this is becoming a central emphasis of current access and participation work. But the missing 4,700 already have the grades – there’s clearly more work to be done on admissions and aspiration too.
The Sutton Trust notes that:
Recent changes by the Office for Students have introduced a “risk register” for universities to choose from when focusing their access efforts, however, this approach potentially risks allowing universities to cherry pick access gaps which are the easiest to tackle, and risks that the sector as a whole may fail to tackle these persistent gaps.
I’m sure OfS will be on top of any cherry picking. The easy work on participation has been done, if we are genuinely interested in driving improvements in access and participation from here on in the work will be hard and uncomfortable.
If we have a system that alleges to hinge on student choice, we have to accept that some students are not going to make the ‘best’ choices (if we are defining best choices by ‘meets the highest entry requirements.’) There are many reasons students from underrepresented backgrounds choose not to go to Russell Group isntitutions despite having the grades: they want to live at home because the cost of moving away is too high (both in terms of money and also in being away from their support networks); they have family circumstances that mean they can’t move away from home, and so have to choose between commutable unviersities (they have jobs already, or care for family members); or maybe they would rather go to a university where the students look and sound like them and where they feel comfortable. Three years as a fish out of water is not a fun experience. Perhaps these institutions should first and foremost be looking at ways they can change their culture or become more inclusive of working class students and others from underrepresented backgrounds.
As usual the Sutton Trust’s emphasis is to elide student success with the Russell Group, so that the problem becomes ‘instead of 3,000 possible students not going to the RG, now there are 4,700’. A more nuanced view may be that more and more students with high Ucas tariff points are choosing to attend a wider range of other HE providers. Which is entirely understandable when we consider that most ‘non-selective’ providers in fact have some provision that in fact demands higher tariffs. For too long we have accepted that ‘selective’ and ‘recruiting’ institutions are at entirely different poles of a rational distribution that sorts the ‘wheat’ from the ‘chaf’. It might suit the government, and if definitely suits the RG, to speak in terms of the deserving and underserving applicant, but it doesn’t reflect the reality of the sector.