It is not clear why
Who remembers the HESA Widening Participation performance indicator?
The changing whims of regulators mean that the last publication of this UKPI data took place in 2020-21. It was an attempt to provide a comparable UK-wide approach to understanding institutional progress in widening access and participation, and it used a range of indicators to identify disadvantaged students.
These included:
These were then measured against a location adjusted benchmark, which took account of where students entering a particular university hailed from, along with their subject of study and entry qualifications.
Now the reason I bring this up is because the Social Mobility Commission has decided to re-run it for the cohort which (generally) entered in 2018-19. Re-run is perhaps overegging it: we still use the state school marker, plus IDACI (an area based measure of childhood deprivation), and free school meals status (which seems to have become a marker of “working class” status). The location-aware benchmarking approach also remains.
If you want to play along at home I have a plot of the data on Wonkhe from back in the day.
While in UKPI days entry requirements only featured in benchmarks, the SMC have taken a different route – we can compare the proportion of disadvantaged young people at a provider with the proportion in that cohort overall, and the proportion in the part of that cohort that met that university’s entry requirements (with this comparison rather grandly tagged as a “social mobility coefficient”).
The SMC have chosen to express its findings as a series of league tables, admirably timed to make headlines in A level results week.
If you are familiar with sector data I can imagine that you are screaming at your screen right now, which is frankly what I did when I first read the report.
Ok, deep breaths. Why 2018-19 entry? It is entirely possible to administratively match the National Pupil Data based with HESA data right up to 2024-25 – and a later year would give a clearer and fairer picture of the state of play now. Even LEO data (which is necessarily lagged to get a picture of what graduates do one year after graduation) is available for later years than that. And the cited reason of pandemic-era mark instability doesn’t cut it. The actual regulator uses that same data to do actual regulating (apparently)
Why not use UCAS data directly (or my versions)? UCAS captures state school markers, FSM markers, and postcode (which you could use to derive IDACI if you felt like the already published IMD wasn’t hitting the mark as an area-based measure of deprivation). And you could do this for 18 year old admissions for the 2025 entry cycle, which feels far more useful.
Why not use the OfS Access and Participation data dashboard? Or, if the reason is because it is a gargantuan pain to use, my derived dashboards (which already allow you to build league tables if that happens to be your kink). This data source offers you FSM, IMD, and all kinds of other fun markers (ethnicity and gender are always popular ones). And more importantly, it allows you to take a view on social mobility that extends through continuation, completion, and attainment at university through to progression to that graduate job (the latter being the current interest in social mobility research and evaluation).
(As a personal aside, why not publish UKPRN codes alongside the data, allowing people to make the kinds of comparisons I have described above? The struggle is real.)
The conclusions drawn by SMC beg another question. The kind of thing they seem to want to say is that we should return to a pre-OfS measure of access and participation by raw numbers, and ignore all the evidence and evaluation that suggests that encouraging universities to partner with schools more generally is a much more effective means of driving a much broader conception of social mobility (of a definition previously argued for by, er, the SMC). Perhaps a chat with TASO would help?
So, if you want to say something about the fact that suitably qualified young people are choosing not to go to selective universities – why ignore the large amount of work and data collection that already maps this problem spaces in a far more nuanced, and current, way?
These rankings are going to turn up in newspapers, shorn of context or analysis, and they are going to annoy almost everyone who works to actually improve social mobility.