Sector support on contextual offers

New guidance issued by Universities UK (working with UCAS and the Sutton Trust) aims to support universities in using contextual admissions processes fairly and consistently.

Contextual admissions are a mechanism for appropriately considering a student’s personal circumstances such as where they live, what school they went to, or individual factors like care experience or disability – alongside more traditional factors like level 3 attainment – in making admissions decisions. If non-academic facets of your life are stopping you from getting the kind of A levels you need to go on to HE, there should be a way of compensating for this lack of opportunity and support.

Back in the mists of time this in itself was a controversial idea: surely we just want to recruit the students with the best A levels? If we admit students without the traditional entry qualifications won’t they be less able to cope with university–level study than those following a more conventional route? Doesn’t this “squeeze out” able and capable students?

If ever those arguments had salience, the available evidence, and the mood in the sector, has moved beyond such a simplistic critique. As the Office for Students notes, the majority of providers now use some kind of consideration of applicant circumstances in offermaking – leading to modified offers, additional support, guaranteed interviews. or specialised pre-entry routes including everything from summer schools to foundation years.

The Universities UK intervention is founded on four principles:

• Delivering interventions fairly and impactfully in the admissions cycle
• Making best use of evidence to support contextual decisions
• Delivering interventions that support future student success
• Communicating contextual admissions policy

If you are thinking here of the UUK/GuildHE Fair Admissions Code of Practice you are not alone. The language and approach are similar, though providers are not asked to sign up to this guidance. What we get is helpful – there is a useful summary of the kinds of data and markers used to aid decision making, with a strong slant towards individual measures. Area– and school-based indicators may be useful, but should not be used in isolation.

Of course, some factors may already have been mitigated in level 3 examinations or earlier – the guidance suggests that care should be taken to avoid “double-counting” if basing admissions decisions on similar aspects. And a note suggests that contextual routes that deviate substantially from standard requirements put additional responsibilities on the institution to provide support: and a “reduction that could pose a tangible risk to positive student outcomes” (including those that would cause problems with professional bodies later on) should be avoided.

John Blake will be positively elated to note a heavy emphasis on developing a theory of change to inform the evaluation of the impact of such processes: both in terms of admissions and ongoing success. With the amount of data on student activity available in the modern university, it is possible to track outcomes for students admitted via contextual routes – and this information should be used to design, deliver, and evaluate supporting interventions too.

Alongside the guidance, the Sutton Trust has published a helpfully up-to-date review of the research literature and provider practice. Of particular note is the growing corpus of evidence suggesting that students holding contextual offers achieve at lower, but broadly similar rates, as those admitted with standard offers. Studies stress how difficult it is to disaggregate the impact of the contextual offer itself with the wider impact of disadvantage.

And UCAS has released applicant-facing guidance on contextual offers – helping young people and those supporting them understand the often-bewildering world of admissions. This, of course, addresses just one part of the problem: UUK’s guidance aims to improve provider communications and the documentation of applicant-facing processes, including via outreach work with schools and colleges.