Last year’s Programme for Government was clear that the aspiration of meeting the 2026 interim access target was still in place:

[By 2026 we will have] met our interim target of 18% of full-time first degree entrants to universities coming from the most deprived communities in Scotland.

This year’s was a little more circumscribed, with no mention of the interim figure:

Continue work to improve access to higher education for students from the most socioeconomically disadvantaged communities – towards our goal of 20% of all entrants being from the 20% most deprived communities by 2030.

And last week at education committee, Minister for Higher and Further Education Graeme Dey sounded cautious, to say the least:

The challenge that we face, to be realistic, is that we are in danger of hitting a ceiling using the current single measure that we have. For a variety of reasons, it becomes difficult to go further and to hit the 2026 target.

But in today’s response to Commissioner for Fair Access John McKendrick’s first report, we hear that the Scottish government “remains committed to the 2026 target and its delivery.”

Getting out of neutral

In his report in January, McKendrick warned that progress on access had “stalled”, noting that the share of entrants from deprived areas fell from 16.7 per cent in 2020–21 to 16.5 per cent in 2021–22. We now (finally!) have HESA data for 2022–23, so we can see that the motor troubles continued:

	2018–19	2019–20	2020–21	2021–22	2022–23
Quintile 1 – most deprived (SIMD)	4,900	4,970	5,515	5,595	5,315
Quintile 2 (SIMD)	4,970	4,635	5,270	5,690	5,300
Quintile 3 (SIMD)	5,605	5,505	6,165	6,120	5,720
Quintile 4 (SIMD)	6,835	6,690	7,150	7,535	7,355
Quintile 5 – least deprived (SIMD)	8,590	8,435	8,915	8,915	8,965
Unknown quintile (SIMD)	165	375	275	25	45
Quintile 1 % (excluding unknown)	15.9%	16.4%	16.7%	16.5%	16.3%

That said, this summer brought fairly good news for Scottish entry rates, and if we look at accepted Scottish-domiciled applicants by deprivation quintile 15 days after level 3 results day – that is, today – 2024 entry looks to have been a good one for widening participation targets. We should of course caution that looking at UCAS figures rather than the comprehensive HESA data is very much an imperfect proxy.

	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024
Quintile 1	5490	5580	5390	5340	5960
Quintile 2	5470	5910	5560	5350	5800
Quintile 3	6490	6630	6220	5930	6170
Quintile 4	7840	8310	8050	7960	8350
Quintile 5	9830	10,140	9840	9670	10270
Unknown quintile	40	40	20	10	40
Quintile 1 % (excluding unknown)	15.6%	15.3%	15.4%	15.6%	16.3%

So it’s not unrealistic to think that there could be an uptick in entry rates for the most deprived quartile – the 2026 target might still be in reach.

More SIMD against than sinning

But is it the right target? The problems with the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) are set out in this article from Robert Gordon University’s William Hardie and Steve Olivier in 2022. In a nutshell, an area-based measure of deprivation struggles when the majority of SIMD20 school leavers – those in the first quartile – are heavily concentrated in certain parts of the country, which creates problems particularly for providers in more rural areas.

John McKendrick’s initial report wanted to retain SIMD as the national metric, and the government response today concurs: “SIMD is a long established measure and its continuing use is required as both a benchmark and to inform future activity.” The commissioner also wanted SIMD to be used in deciles up to SIMD40 – making the measure more granular, essentially, meaning that we would be able to see access rates for those from the most deprived ten per cent of areas, the second most, and so on. The government response agrees in principle and suggests that the Scottish Funding Council and universities consider this further.

McKendrick also followed in the footsteps of his predecessor Peter Scott in advocating a move away from institutional SIMD targets, towards a basket of indicators which universities would define for themselves based on their own contexts. The new commissioner didn’t go quite this far, in fact, suggesting that the institutional target was withdrawn in return for

a commitment from each HEI to take action to increase the proportion of SIMD20 among its entrants or, if this is demonstrably not possible without adverse consequences, to match the highest proportion and number of SIMD20 entrants that it achieved since 2013–14.

The government response agrees in principle, noting that “specific universities have consistently failed to meet institutional targets, often with valid justifications.” On the basket of indicators suggestion, Graeme Dey had more detail regarding ongoing work last week at committee:

We are running a pilot in Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, where there is an existing data-sharing arrangement between the two local authorities that allows them to share information on free school meals. Unfortunately, we do not have such agreements in place in other localities. We are looking at the options with regard to whether that can happen in other places. Another suggestion has been that we could use the school clothing grant by way of an additional measure.

[…] The difficulty concerns the existing legislation in this area. It may be that, in the longer term, we have to introduce legislation to change the position.

Made to measure

In its response today, the Scottish government says that it wants to retain the right to approve the access measures used – rather than giving universities too free a hand to pick their metrics of choice – and that these must also be accompanied by “rigorous analysis to enable evaluation of performance against them and outcomes for students.” Better evaluation was a theme of McKendrick’s first report, and the government response suggests that the Scottish sector should consider taking a leaf out of TASO’s book.

The measures used to assess institutional performance are to be discussed at a “ministerial roundtable”, presumably the upcoming “tripartite” forum comprising the government, Scottish Funding Council and Universities Scotland, which parallels a similar initiative for the colleges sector that’s been in place for the past year.

The potential future use of new access measures could solve the issues caused by the blunt use of area-based metrics in Scotland’s particular context, even if the actual mechanics of making the data work look to require serious plumbing. Plans for new systems could also serve as a helpful get-out if the 2026 and 2030 access targets prove out of reach – and for the former at least, in some of the government’s recent remarks you get the sense they are laying the groundwork for a soft landing.

This would also help fend off the accusation, understandably levelled, that continually declining government funding per student is the real barrier to expanding opportunity.