Category: Access & WP

University shouldn’t just postpone cliff edges for care experienced students

A new report from TASO (Transforming Access and Outcomes for Students) shines a light on the barriers faced by those with experience of children’s social care entering and succeeding in higher education.

The research points to a stark reality – inequitable access to higher education for care-experienced individuals, but also for a much larger group of people who have experienced children’s social care.

Part of the problem is that support systems often hinge on rigid definitions like “care leaver,” leaving many students, who face similar challenges, without the help they need.

When institutional policies fail to account for the diversity of these experiences, students are left to navigate higher education and life beyond it largely on their own.

The report also suggests that while “care leavers” may have better access to support through Local Authorities (LAs) dedicated widening participation schemes, while those not neatly fitting into this category often fall through the cracks.

But even if the definitions were fixed and there was more focus on “getting on” as well as getting in, what if higher education’s current offer isn’t enough to transform these students’ lives?

Understanding diversity

When the diversity of experience is overlooked, those needing support often miss out or don’t realise they’re entitled to it. Worse, support organisations sometimes view this diversity with suspicion.

For example, the SLC’s rigid “estranged” or “in contact” policy fails to grasp complex family dynamics. Grey rocking – where abuse victims maintain minimal contact for safety – is ignored, leading to invasive social media monitoring and a profound lack of understanding of the complexities of family breakdowns.

At the Unite Foundation, we provide free, year-round accommodation for care leavers and estranged students, improving outcomes by offering stability during studies and after graduation. The support gives graduates the breathing room to seek degree-relevant work instead of scrambling for immediate housing and employment.

We understand that care and estrangement experiences vary widely. Some students enter care due to bereavement, maintain some family contact, or support younger siblings – highlighting how rigid policies fail to capture real-life complexities.

A more nuanced approach is needed. I recently spoke with a vice chancellor who dismissed targeted support for estranged students, claiming most came from low-income, BTEC backgrounds, so existing support sufficed. But when I explained that many South Asian women – across all social classes – estrange themselves over arranged marriage disputes, he could not point to any existing support provisions that would reasonably address their needs.

Recognising and addressing the diverse experiences of social care or estrangement is essential for creating a more equitable education system, and the TASO report helps highlight this need.

Ongoing support

The report makes clear that gaining access to university for those with experience of social care is only the first challenge – and there is a dire need to strengthen retention strategies.

The authors reference a proposal previously suggested by the Social Market Foundation, where providers could receive an additional £1,000 for each care leaver they recruit. Tony Moss and I proposed a similar idea on Wonkhe a few years ago, arguing that care leavers should be included in the OfS student premium allocation formula.

This would require some clarity around definitions and eligibility, but it would significantly help smaller and less financially robust institutions establish support systems for social care experienced students.

And support schemes are effective. The University of York, for example, offers free accommodation to care-experienced students and has seen applications from such students triple. Similarly, the University of Cardiff acts as a legal guarantor for any student in need of one for a rental contract – without a single case of rent default in the past decade.

An interesting aspect of the report highlights that the pathways to higher education for young people with experience in children’s social care often vary based on the type and timing of their experiences. In particular, it urges higher-tariff and more “prestigious” institutions to expand access to students from vocational pathways.

Two years ago, while reviewing the UCAS Next Steps report, I noted that applicants from care-experienced backgrounds are 179 per cent more likely to apply for health and social care courses than their non-care-experienced peers.

At the time, the Care-Experienced Graduates’ Decision-Making, Choices and Destinations Project offered some insight into this trend, explaining that a history in care often drives care-experienced people to altruistically pursue work such fields.

Additionally, I suggested that the accessibility of these courses through Access to Higher Education Diplomas and the employment certainty they offer post-graduation could play significant roles.

And I have also previously argued that care leavers have more direct contact with social workers, which exposes them to career trajectories of adults who influence them – similar to how children of lawyers are 17 times more likely to become lawyers than children of parents in other professions. So it all makes sense.

Care-experienced people need to see all higher education options as viable – not just the ones their circumstances push them toward. If they gravitate to certain courses due to access, bursaries, community, or career pathways, we should replicate these benefits across other disciplines. TASO’s call for research-intensive universities to support care-experienced students from vocational pathways is a crucial step.

Postponing the cliff-edge?

Become’s End the Care Cliff report highlighted how care leavers face an abrupt transition to independence – often much earlier than peers who typically leave home around 24. This “care cliff” leaves many at risk of housing instability and homelessness, with care leavers nine times more likely to become homeless. While TASO’s recommendations help students avoid this cliff during university, what happens when support vanishes at graduation?

The report noted that higher education can transform lives, but only if care leavers are supported to complete their degrees. But a degree alone doesn’t guarantee stability if old barriers reappear once institutional support ends.

Social work – a field with a high representation of care-experienced students – suffers from high stress and low staff retention, with average careers lasting just five to nine years. This may reflect not just job stress but also the complex backgrounds of many staff.

A 2022 UCAS report highlighted how support for care leavers often ends abruptly after graduation. Without ongoing help in early careers, the “care cliff” isn’t eliminated – just postponed.

The TASO report also highlights the need for secure housing during university breaks, but the real challenge is post-graduation.

Without family support, social care-experienced graduates often face unstable, high-cost housing that undermines career stability. While many peers live rent-free with parents, care-experienced graduates pay full rent on the same salary – assuming they’re even paid equally.

Employers may exploit their financial inexperience, and hybrid working only widens this gap – given their living conditions often aren’t conducive to productivity.

Beyond housing, these graduates face layered disadvantages. They’re more likely to be older, disabled, from minority backgrounds, or managing trauma-related health issues – often overlooked by employers.

Many are also overrepresented in high-risk groups, including justice involvement and sex work, which can impact career prospects.

Research then shows that early disadvantages persist into middle age, suggesting a need for long-term support. While the TASO report robustly addresses access and retention in higher education, it misses a crucial element – graduate careers.

Providers should prepare social care-experienced students for the workforce. But a real focus on “getting on” must also involve pushing both central government and employers to understand their lived realities beyond graduation.

If HE is serious about changing lives, it needs to work to eliminate the care cliff – not just delay it.

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March 14, 2025
Diversifying medicine by widening participation

Medicine is an elite profession, traditionally dominated by white, male, middle- or upper-class people, frequently from medical families.

In 2014, the Medical Schools Council (MSC) created a Selection Alliance (SA), and published Selecting for Excellence (SfE), to address inequities in access to medical degrees in the UK for those from “widening participation” backgrounds.

Fostering Potential: 10 years on from Selecting for Excellence , published in December of 2024, reports on progress made, with welcome achievements that are testament to the commitment of the community. The report rightly notes that focus on widening access has meant support for diverse students once they commence studies has been neglected.

Recently, medical student activism – #LiveableNHSBursary , and #FixOurFunding – have highlighted the peculiar funding situation medical students find themselves in , and the financial pressures they experience during their studies.

Fostering Potential asserts that WP needs to be reconceptualised away from a deficit framing of individuals as lacking ambition or aptitude to excel, to understanding lack of participation as the product of systemic and institutional failures around inclusion. For me, one of the main barriers to success for students from a disadvantaged socio-economic background studying medicine is the degree was designed and developed for a financially comfortable student. Its current structure excludes students from diverse backgrounds, and part of this is financial.

The earnings gap

One might argue that the financial hardship experienced by student medics is the temporary cost of what will become a lucrative career. However, once qualified, doctors from a lower socio-economic background will experience an average class pay gap of £3,640. This means their degree is both harder won and less remunerative.

Current research and initiatives on financial barriers to success mostly treat money as a discernible object that can be quantified. It is a thing we either have enough of, or not; something we earn for ourselves as individuals. Hence proposed solutions tend to focus on maximising individual students’ abilities to earn alongside studies, while recognising that lack of time due to part-time work or caring responsibilities means some students cannot take advantage of extracurricular career development opportunities.

I find this contradictory and suggest it misses a key point – money is also a relationship; it shapes our experiences of the world far beyond how much we have. It is a condition of success, not a result of it. Developing support for a student from a financially disadvantaged background should be informed by research that explicates how poverty impacts students’ opportunities to learn and exploit the advantages higher education allegedly offers.

A student’s-eye-view

I lead a project at Lancaster Medical School called Medicine Success, providing funds to mitigate the hidden costs of a medical degree for students from diverse backgrounds – purchasing a stethoscope, professional attire and funding the compulsory elective.

Five years of project evaluation data reveal much about the role money plays in students’ sense of belonging and success. A student’s-eye-view of the degree reveals how unexpected its hidden costs are, how difficult it is to cover the cost of living and studying without financial support, and how choices about career development are constrained by cost. Further, the data shows students with scarce resources are keenly aware of how wealth is a vector of exclusion and inequity shaping their experience of the degree differently to their wealthier peers:

Receiving these funds made a massive difference as it took me by surprise how much of a financial burden studying at university was. It seems that every aspect of it requires you to spend money that you don’t have and I feel at times it’s not all inclusive (2nd year, 2024)

Their evaluations of the funding show that money transforms our lived experience of the world, and in turn, shapes our thoughts and feelings. They explain how scarcity can impact mental health and mental bandwidth, and the funding alleviates financial anxiety and paid-work commitments so they may focus on their studies.

But it means more than just being able to afford essentials, it means being able to participate equally and with pride in their degree in comparison to their wealthier peers. This directly impacts self-esteem and addresses feelings of unworthiness or lack of belonging.

A good example of this is the professional attire fund:

I know professional attire might not seem serious but not having the right attire when it’s necessary leads me to overthink about how I’m dressed and feeling insecure during sessions. It’s often to the point where instead of focusing on learning I can’t help but to think about my appearance. (1st year, 2020)

It is well-established that class can be read through a multitude of symbols. Respondents describe how their “lower” social status feels revealed through clothing, making them feel insecure in the learning environment. Students relate having their cheap and tired-looking clothes pointed out to them by peers, others worried about wearing the same outfit every day and what that said about their finances, while some feel that their patients have less respect for their opinion when they don’t present well-dressed. Meanwhile, ill-fitting clothing and shoes also interfere with the ability to focus on studies, causing pain and making long shifts additionally exhausting.

Widening participation initiatives that focus on belonging from a social, cultural or academic skills perspective miss this crucial element – money. One student articulates a point made repeatedly by many of their peers:

Funds like these make students like myself feel more heard and seen and gives us the opportunity to come from a lower socio-economic background and not feel as if we don’t belong here simply due to lack of finance. It gives us the confidence and the ability to work hard for what we want as we know there is always support available for students like us. (1st year, 2022)

Recipients of Medicine Success funding attest that financial support levels the playing field with their more privileged peers in numerous, significant, and yet, subtle ways. Providing financial support is essential to make the learning environment, social activities, and career development accessible to students from all backgrounds. Belonging is in part financial; you can’t participate fully without money.

Wider Context

Recent reports show that the government is making a loss on student loans due to higher interest rates . This means private lending institutions are making a profit from the scheme funded by tax-payers and graduate repayments. In Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, Andrew Sayer explains that our current political system “supports rentier interests, particularly by making the 99 per cent indebted to the 1 per cent” , in which wealthy people are less likely to earn money through paid work, but accrue wealth through financial activities. The student loans scheme is one example.

Higher education is presented as a means of social mobility, while extracting wealth into a financial sector that shores up its and its investors power. It does so by making already poor people pay to access education but without the conditions to participate fully. The promise of breaking the cycle of poverty with a university degree is so powerful that it deflects attention from what is really happening, despite extensive evidence that education has yet to prove itself as a solution to class inequalities. For these reasons, even with WP policies, HE has financial injustice embedded within it, resulting in deleterious effects on students’ mental health, degree experiences and outcomes.

I see this as an example of “financial trauma,” defined by Chloe McKenzie as “the cumulative effect of being required to experience economic violence, financial abuse, financial shaming, and/or (chronic) financial stress to attain or sustain material safety”.

Social mobility is a problematic term; it requires individual people to increase their position in an established hierarchy that is itself integral to maintaining socioeconomic inequality. This is why I welcome the MSC’s push to reconceptualise improving participation as a systemic issue, not one focussed on changing individuals to fit into the status quo. At the same time, we must apply this thinking to financial barriers to success, by recognising that money is far from a private issue but a matter of justice.

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March 13, 2025
Why do we punish low-income students for entering education?

Much has been written about the financial challenges many students face in going to university, and the fact that maintenance loans fall quite some way short of covering the cost of living for students.

Much has also been written about the national trend of mature students numbers coming to university being in decline, with particular implications for certain sectors such as healthcare, where we are struggling to meet workforce need.

These two areas of concern are quite likely related and linked to what we believe is a fundamentally unfair and regressive policy which impacts people who are in receipt of Universal Credit.

Under the current Universal Credit (UC) system, for people who are in work, UC is reduced by 55p for every £1 earned as income.

However, if you are entitled to receive Universal Credit and decide to go to university, for every £1 you receive in maintenance loan funding, your UC entitlement is reduced by £1 – and not by 55p as is the case for earned income.

Make it make sense

On the face of it, this seems highly inequitable – why should income derived from a student loan (which will, of course, need to be repaid with interest) be treated more harshly than earned income?

Another reaction to this approach might be to ask, “Why wouldn’t students who are eligible to receive UC simply not draw down their maintenance loan at all?”.

Unfortunately, this option is not open to those students, because the rules around reductions to UC make clear that the pound-for-pound deductions from UC are based upon the maximum maintenance loan for which you are eligible, regardless of whether you actually take the loan.

It is worth highlighting that, in general, full time university students are not eligible to claim Universal Credit. However, exceptions do apply, such as if you are under 21 and do not have parental support, or if you are responsible for the care of a child (the full list of eligibility criteria can be found here). In other words, students who we know are more likely to need additional support to be successful in higher education.

The Child Poverty Action Group have dedicated information for students who are entitled to claim UC, to explain the impact of having access to a maintenance loan on their UC payments.

In their worked example, a single mother of a 3yr old child, living in private rented accommodation, could have UC payments of £1399.60 reduced to £475.71 per month as a result of going into full time higher education and having access to a maintenance loan.

In other words, this mother would be taking on a personal loan debt of well over £900 per month – on top of the cost of tuition fees – which would otherwise have been paid as UC if she had not decided to access education.

We believe that this scenario may be without precedent in terms of our UC and wider benefit system, in that we know of no other situation in which someone who is entitled to claim benefits would be told that they need to take out a personal loan to replace their benefits entitlement.

In a recent ministerial question on this issue, the government explicitly confirmed that:

…successive Governments have held the principle that the benefit system does not normally support full-time students. Rather, they are supported by the educational maintenance system.

This principle may have been fine when maintenance support was distributed as a grant rather than a loan, but we would argue that there is something deeply regressive about asking students from backgrounds who are already less likely to access education to forego benefit support to which they would be otherwise fully entitled.

Breaking down barriers

The current government has set out an ambitious set of missions to “Build a Better Britain”, which includes a mission to “Break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage”.

We would argue strongly that the impact of having access to a maintenance loan on UC payments is an unfair and unnecessary barrier to students who wish to access higher education, and may well be a significant factor in why some mature learners are seeing university study as a less attractive option.

Finding and fixing barriers of this kind – which could be easily addressed by allowing students who are eligible to access UC to continue doing so – would be entirely consistent with this government’s mission.

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March 10, 2025
Navigating the path to higher education after local authority care

Young people in England with experience of children’s social care face significant barriers to entering and succeeding in higher education.

Our research at TASO – Pathways into and through higher education for young people with experience of children’s social care – conducted alongside the Rees Centre, University of Oxford, highlights significant and concerning disparities.

For example, at the age of 22, compared with the general population, care leavers and those who have ever been in care are four times less likely to enter higher education – 14 per cent of care-experienced people versus 56 per cent of the general population. Of those care leavers who do make it into higher education, 18 per cent drop out, more than double the withdrawal rate of their peers in the general population.

And it’s not just care leavers who experience unequal outcomes. The research looked more widely at anyone with experience of children’s social care – a group that is around 20 times larger than the care leaver population – and found stark inequalities in their access to and experience of higher education compared not only to the general population, but also compared to those eligible for free school meals. For example, “children in need” are two to three times less likely to attend higher education than the general population.

These results suggest that the experience of children’s social care has a lasting impact on educational prospects, and that the needs of affected young people are not being met by the current support system. Although the findings are perhaps not surprising, they are still shocking. Our report aims to act as a call to action for universities, policymakers and those seeking to close equality gaps in higher education.

Routes to an unlevel playing field

Not only is there an uphill struggle to the higher education “playing field” for those who have been in care, once there, the playing field itself is far from level. The data shows that getting those with experience of children’s social care into university is only the first challenge to address, and the high dropout rate demonstrates that targeted work is required to improve retention and support systems.

Care leavers – and others with experience of children’s social care – often take alternative routes to university. Over one-third (36 per cent) of care leavers take a vocational pathway, compared to just 13 per cent of the general population, and they are more likely to start university later in life rather than at the traditional age of 18. This suggests that the traditional academic pipeline does not serve them effectively, and that policymakers should aim to support these alternative pathways and set strategies for recruiting mature learners.

Care leavers and entry rates

There are some differences between those with experience of children’s social care overall and care leavers specifically. Although care leavers have poorer outcomes on most measures, care leavers have a relatively high entry rate at age 18/19, compared to other groups who have experienced children’s social care.

This could be due to a higher level of support being made available for this group in the transition from post-16 settings to higher education, reinforcing the importance of targeted interventions.

Accommodation outside of term time

Accommodation is another crucial area where care-experienced people are at a disadvantage, often without a stable home to go to during the term breaks. We need closer collaboration between local authorities and higher education providers to ensure they are collectively meeting their duty of support to care-experienced learners, and especially care leavers where the state has a corporate-parent responsibility.

This is one clear area where more joined-up working is needed to help ensure that care-experienced students have somewhere suitable to stay when universities close their doors outside of term time.

The people within the statistics

It is also important to note that many with experience of children’s social care enter higher education and thrive. As with all statistical reports, focusing on averages, however derived, risks missing the many important exceptions. That is, some individuals succeed despite the relatively long odds of doing so, and we should not interpret statistical results in a causal or absolute way.

We hope, in particular, that Virtual School Heads – a regional role that acts as a headteacher for all children with a social worker within a particular local authority – will find the research helpful when working on the strategic goal of improving educational inclusion and participation for care-experienced children and young people.

A call for change

The research underscores the fact that universities – including more selective or prestigious institutions – should rethink their approach to recruiting and supporting those with experience of children’s social care.

We outline some of the ways to support these groups – by recruiting mature learners, those from vocational pathways, and by strengthening retention strategies. One possible idea, previously suggested by the Social Market Foundation, is that providers could be offered an additional £1,000 for each care leaver they recruit as a “student premium”, beyond existing accommodation support. At TASO, we want to see higher education providers evaluating their interventions to attract and support those with experience of children’s social care, so we can start to build a picture of what works to benefit these students.

Our report makes it clear: universities, policymakers and local authorities must work together to ensure that those with experience of children’s social care are not left behind. The challenges they face in accessing and completing higher education are not inevitable but significant and targeted support is required to change the status quo. If higher education is a vehicle for social mobility, the continued focus on underrepresented groups – including those with experience of children’s social care – is vital.

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March 6, 2025
Five keys to success in Evaluation Capacity Building for widening participation

Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate is a mantra that those engaged in widening participation in recent years will be all too familiar with.

Over the past decade and particularly in the latest round of Access and Participation Plans (APP), the importance of evaluation and evidencing best practice have risen up the agenda, becoming integral parts of the intervention strategies that institutions are committing to in order to address inequality.

This new focus on evaluation raises fundamental questions about the sector’s capacity to sustainably deliver high-quality, rigorous and appropriate evaluations, particularly given its other regulatory and assessment demands (e.g. REF, TEF, KEF etc.).

For many, the more exacting standards of evidence have triggered a scramble to deliver evaluation projects, often facilitated by external organisations, consultancies and experts, often at considerable expense, to deliver what the Office for Students’ (OfS) guidance has defined as Type 2 or 3 evidence (capable of correlative or causal inference).

The need to demonstrate impact is one we can all agree is worthy, given the importance of addressing the deep rooted and pervasive inequalities baked into the UK HE sector. It is therefore crucial that the resources available are deployed wisely and equitably.

In the rush for higher standards, it is easy to be lured in by “success” and forget the steps necessary to embed evaluation in institutions, ensuring a plurality of voices can contribute to the conversation, leading to a wider shift in culture and practice.

We risk, in only listening to those well placed to deliver large-scale evaluation projects and communicate the findings loudest, of overlooking a huge amount of impactful and important work.

Feeling a part of it

There is no quick fix. The answer lies in the sustained work of embedding evaluative practice and culture within institutions, and across teams and individuals – a culture that imbues values of learning, growth and reflection over and above accountability and league tables.

Evaluation Capacity Building (ECB) offers a model or approach to help address these ongoing challenges. It has a rich associated literature, which for brevity’s sake we will not delve into here.

In essence, it describes the process of improving the ability of organisations to do and use evaluation, through supporting individuals, teams and decision makers to prioritise evaluation in planning and strategy and invest time and resources into improving knowledge and competency in this area.

The following “keys to success” are the product of what we learned while applying this approach across widening participation and student success initiatives at Lancaster University.

Identify why

We could not have garnered the interest of those we worked with without having a clear idea of the reasons we were taking the approach we did. Critically, this has to work both ways: “why should you bother evaluating?” and “why are we trying to build evaluation capacity?”

Unhelpfully, evaluation has a bad reputation.

It is very often seen by those tasked to undertake it as an imposition, driven by external agendas and accountability mandates – not helped by the jargon laden and technical nature of the discipline.

If you don’t take the time to identify and communicate your motivations for taking this approach, you risk falling at the first hurdle. People will be hesitant to invest their time in attending your training, understanding the challenging concepts and investing their limited resources into evaluation, unless they have a good reason to do so.

“Because I told you so” does not amount to a very convincing reason either. When identifying “why”, it is best you do so collaboratively and consider the specific needs, values and aspirations of those you are working with. To those ends, you might want to consider developing a Theory of Change for your own ECB initiative.

Consider the context

When developing resources or a series of interventions to support ECB at your institution, you should at all times consider the specific context in which you find yourself. There are many models, methods and resources available in the evaluation space, including those provided by organisations such as TASO, the UK Evaluation Society (UKES) or the Global Evaluation Initiative (BetterEvaluation.org), not to mention the vast literature on evaluation methods and methodologies. The possibilities are both endless and potentially overwhelming.

To help navigate this abundance, you should use the institutional context in which you are intending to deliver ECB as your guide. For whom are you developing the resources? What are their needs? What is appropriate? What is feasible? How much time, money and expertise does this require? Who is the audience for the evaluation? Why are they choosing to evaluate their work at this time and in this way?

In answering these and other similar questions, the “why” you identified above, will be particularly helpful. Ensuring the resources and training you provide are suitable and accessible is not easy, so don’t be perturbed if you get it wrong. The key is to be reflective and seek feedback from those you are working with.

Surround yourself with researchers, educationalists and practitioners

Doing and using evaluation are highly prized skills that require specific knowledge and expertise. The same applies to developing training and educational resources to support effective learning and development outcomes.

Evaluation is difficult enough for specialists to get their heads around. Imagine how it must feel for those for whom this is not an area of expertise, nor even a primary area of responsibility. Too often the training and support available assumes high levels of knowledge and does not take the time to explain its terms.

How do we expect someone to understand the difference between correlative and causal evidence of impact, if we haven’t explained what we mean by evaluation, evidence or impact, not to mention correlation or causation? How do we expect people to implement an experimental evaluation design, if we haven’t explained what an evaluation design is, how you might implement it or how “experimental” differs from other kinds of design and when it is or isn’t appropriate?

So, surround yourself with researchers, educators and practitioners who have a deep understanding of their respective domains and can help you to develop accessible and appropriate resources.

Create outlets for evaluation insight

Publishing findings can be daunting, time-consuming and risky. For this reason, it’s a good idea to create more localised outlets for the evaluation insights being generated by the ECB work you’ve been doing. This will allow the opportunity to hone presentations, interrogate findings and refine language in a more forgiving and collaborative space.

At Lancaster University, we launched our Social Mobility Symposium in September 2023 with this purpose in mind. It provided a space for colleagues from across the University engaged in widening participation initiatives and with interests in wider issues of social mobility and inequality to come together and share the findings they generated through evaluation and research.

As the title suggests, the event was not purely about evaluation, which helped to engage diverse audiences with the insights arising from our capacity building work. “Evaluation by stealth,” or couching evaluative insights in discussions of subjects that have wider appeal, can be an effective way of communicating your findings. It also encourages those who have conducted the evaluations to present their results in an accessible and applied manner.

Establish leadership buy in

Finally, if you are planning to explore ECB as an approach to embedding and nurturing evaluation at an institutional level (i.e. beyond the level of individual interventions), then it is critical to have the buy in of senior managers, leaders and decision makers.

Part of the why for the teams you are working with will no doubt include some approximation of the following: that your efforts will be recognised, the insights generated will inform decision making, the analyses you do will make a difference, and will be shared widely to support learning and sharing of best practice.

As someone who is supporting capacity building endeavours you might not be able to guarantee these objectives. It is important therefore to focus equal attention on building the evaluation capacity and literacy of those who can.

This can be challenging and difficult to control for. It depends on, among other things: the established culture and personnel in leadership positions, their receptiveness to new ideas, the flexibility and courage they have to explore new ways of doing things, and the capacity of the institution to utilise the insights generated through more diverse evaluative practices. The rewards are potentially significant, both in supporting the institution to continuously improve and meet its ongoing regulatory requirements.

There is great potential in the field of evaluation to empower and elevate voices that are sometimes overlooked, but there is an equal and opposite risk of disempowerment and exclusion. Reductive models of evaluation, preferencing certain methods over others, risk impoverishing our understanding of the world around us and the impact we are having. It is crucial to have at our disposal a repertoire of approaches that are appropriate to the situation at hand and that fosters learning as well as value assessment.

Done well, ECB provides a means of enriching the narrative in widening participation, as well as many other areas, though it requires a coherent institutional and sectoral approach to be truly successful.

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February 21, 2025
What’s next in equality of opportunity evaluation?

In the Evaluation Collective – a cross-sector group of like-minded evaluation advocates – we have reason to celebrate two related interventions.

One is the confirmation of a TASO and HEAT helmed evaluation library – the other John Blake’s recent Office for Students (OfS) blog What’s next in equality of opportunity regulation.

We cheer his continued focus on evaluation and collaboration (both topics close to our collective heart). In particular, we raised imaginary (in some cases…) glasses to John Blake’s observation that:

Ours is a sector founded on knowledge creation, curation, and communication, and all the skills of enquiry, synthesis and evidence-informed practice that drive the disciplines English HE providers research and teach, should also be turned to the vital priorities of expanding the numbers of students able to enter HE, and ensuring they have the best chance to succeed once they are admitted.

That’s a hard YES from us.

Indeed, there’s little in our Evaluation Manifesto (April 2022) that isn’t thinking along the same lines. Our final manifesto point addresses almost exactly this:

The Evaluation Collective believe that higher education institutions should be learning organisations which promote thinking cultures and enact iterative and meaningful change. An expansive understanding of evaluation such as ours creates a space where this learning culture can flourish. There is a need to move the sector beyond simply seeking and receiving reported impact.

We recognise that OfS has to maintain a balance between evaluation for accountability (they are our sector regulator after all) and evaluation for enhancement and learning.

Evaluation in the latter mode often requires different thinking, methodologies and approaches. Given the concerning reversal of progress in HE access indicated by recent data this focus on learning and enhancement of our practice seems even more crucial.

This brings us to two further collective thoughts.

An intervention intervention

John Blake’s blog references comments made by the Evaluation Collective’s Chair Liz Austen at the Unlocking the Future of Fair Access event. Liz’s point, which draws on a soon to be published book chapter, is that, from some perspectives, the term intervention automatically implies an evaluation approach that is positivistic and scientific – usually associated with Type 3 causal methodologies such as randomised control trials.

This kind of language can be uncomfortable for those of us evaluating in different modes (and even spark the occasional paradigm war). Liz argued that much of the activity we undertake to address student success outcomes, such as developing inclusive learning, teaching, curriculum and assessment approaches is often more relational, dynamic, iterative and collaborative, as we engage with students, other stakeholders and draws on previous work and thinking from other disciplinary area.

This is quite different to what we might think of as a clinical intervention, which often involves tight scientific control of external contextual factors, closed systems and clearly defined dosage.

We suggest, therefore, that we might need a new language and conceptual approach to how we talk and think about evaluation and what it can achieve for HE providers and the students we support.

The other area Liz picked up concerned the burden of evaluation not only on HE providers, but also the students who are necessarily deeply integrated in our evaluation work with varying degrees of agency – from subjects from whom data is extracted at one end through to co-creators and partners in the evaluation process at the other.

We rely on students to dedicate sufficient time and effort in our evaluation activities. To reduce this burden and ensure we’re making effective use of student input, we need better coordination of regulatory asks for evaluation, not least to help manage the evaluative burden on students/student voices – a key point also made by students Molly Pemberton and Jordan Byrne at the event.

As it is, HE providers are currently required to develop and invest in evaluation across multiple regulatory asks (TEF, APP, B3, Quality Code etc). While this space is not becoming too crowded (the more the merrier), it will take some strategic oversight to manage what is delivered and evaluated, why and by whom and look for efficiencies. We would welcome more sector work to join up this thinking.

Positing repositories

We also toasted John Blake’s continued emphasis on the crucial role of evaluation in continuous improvement.

We must understand whether metrics moving is a response to our activity; without a clear explanation as to why things are getting better, we cannot scale or replicate that impact; if a well-theorised intervention does not deliver, good evaluation can support others to re-direct their efforts.

In support of this, the new evidence repository to house the sector’s evaluation outcomes has been confirmed, with the aim of supporting our evolving practice and improve outcomes for students. This is another toast-worthy proposal. We believe that this resource is much needed.

Indeed, Sheffield Hallam University started its own (publicly accessible) one a few years ago. Alan Donnelly has written an illuminating blog for the Evaluation Collective reflecting on the implementation, benefits and challenges of the approach.

The decision to commission TASO and HEAT to develop this new Higher Education Evidence Library (HEEL), does however, beg a lot of questions about how material is selected for inclusion, who makes the selection and the criteria they use. Here are a few things we hope those organisations are considering.

The first issue is that it is not clear whether this repository is merely primarily designed to address a regulatory requirement for HE providers to publish their evaluation findings or a resource developed to respond to the sector’s knowledge needs. This comes down to clarity of purpose and a clear-eyed view of where the sector needs to develop.

It also comes down to the kinds of resources that will be considered for inclusion. We are also concerned by the prospect of a rigid and limited selection process and believe that useful and productive knowledge is contained in a wide range of publications. We would welcome, for example, a curation approach that recognised the value of non-academic publications.

The contribution of grey literature and less formal publications, for example, is often overlooked. Valuable learning is also contained in evaluation and research conducted in other countries, and indeed, in different academic domains within the social and health sciences.

The potential for translating interventions across different institutional and sector contexts also depends on sharing contextual and implementation information about the target activities and programmes.

As colleagues from the Russell Group Widening Participation Evaluation Forum recently argued on these very pages, the value of sharing evaluation outcomes increases the more we move away from reporting technical and statistical outcomes to include broader reflections and meta-evaluation considerations, the more we collectively learn as a sector the more opportunities we will see for critical friendships and collaborations.

While institutions are committing substantial time and resources to APP implementation, we must resist overly narrowing the remit of our activities and our approach in general. Learning from failed or even poor programmes and activities (and evaluation projects!) can be invaluable in driving progress.

Ray Pawson speaks powerfully of the way in which “nuggets” of valuable learning and knowledge can be found even when panning less promising or unsuccessful evaluation evidence. Perhaps, a pragmatic approach to knowledge generation could trump methodological criteria in the interests of sector progress?

Utopian repositories

Hot on the HEELs of the TASO/HEAT evaluation library collaboration announcement we have put together a wish list for what we would like to see in such a resource. We believe that a well-considered, open and dynamic evaluation and evidence repository could have a significant impact on our collective progress towards closing stubborn equality of opportunity risk gaps.

Submission to this kind of repository could also be helpful for the professionalisation of HE-based evaluation and good for organisational and sector recognition and career progression.

A good model for this kind of approach is the National Teaching Repository (self-upload, no gatekeeper – their tag line “Disseminating accessible ideas that work”). This approach includes a way of tracking the impact and reach of submissions by allocating them a DOI.

This is an issue that Alan and the Sheffield Hallam Team have also cracked, with submissions appearing in scholarly indexes.

We are also mindful of the increasingly grim economic contexts in which most HE staff are currently working. If it does its job well, a repository could help mitigate some of the current constraints and pressures on institutions. Where we continue to work in silos there is a continued risk of wasting resources, by reinventing the same intervention and evaluation wheels in isolation across a multitude of different HE providers.

With more openness and transparency, and sharing work in progress, as well as in completion, we increase the possibility of building on each other’s work, and, hopefully, finding opportunities for collaboration and sharing the workload, in other words efficiency gains.

Moreover, this moves us closer to solving the replication and generalisability challenges, evaluators working together across different institutions can test programmes and activities across a wider set of contexts, resulting in more flexible and generalisable outcomes.

Sliding doors?

There are two further challenges, which are only nominally addressed in John Blake’s blog, but which we feel could have significant influence on the sector impact of the repository of our dreams.

First, effective knowledge management is essential – how will time-pressed practitioners find and apply relevant evidence to their contexts? The repository needs to go beyond storing evaluations to include support to help users to find what they need, when they need it, and include recommendations for implications for practice.

Second, drawing on the development of Implementation Science in fields like medicine and public health could help maximize the repository’s impact on practice. We suggest early consultation with both sector stakeholders and experts from other fields who have successfully tackled these knowledge-to-practice challenges.

At this point in thinking, before concrete development and implementation have taken place, we have the potential for a multitude of possible future repositories and approaches to sector evaluation. We welcome TASO and HEAT’s offer to consult with the sector over the spring as they develop their HEEL and hope to engage in a broad and wide-ranging discussion of how we can collectively design an evaluation and evidence repository that is not just about collecting together artefacts, but which could play an active role in driving impactful practice. And then we can start talking about how the repository can be evaluated.

John Blake will be talking all things evaluation with members of the Evaluation Collective on the 11^th March. Sign up to the EC membership for more details: https://evaluationcollective.wordpress.com/

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February 20, 2025
Getting in and getting on needs to go up the agenda, not down

In January I attended an event alongside colleagues from over 50 universities spanning the breadth of the country.

Collectively we held a significant chunk of the sector’s strategic responsibility for developing, writing and delivering activity linked to the Office for Students’ vision for fair access and participation.

We came from different regions and geographic contexts, working in a range of providers of different sizes, histories, and specialisms.

What brought us together, however, was a passion and commitment to a set of underlying principles which form the foundation of our collective endeavours.

The Forum for Access and Continuing Education (FACE), a charity committed to enabling opportunities across the educational landscape, held their annual summit at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

With speakers such as Public First and John Blake, Director for Fair Access at the Office for Students, the event examined how work which promoted fair access and participation could help us navigate a period of significant turbulence within the HE sector, and society as a whole.

Challenges and threats

It’s fair to say that doing so won’t be easy. The opening plenary from Public First brought home the gravity of the challenge ahead. Whilst many of us thought that a change in government, and an end to the relentless attacks on the sector linked to culture wars narratives, would make life easier for the sector, we may have been overly optimistic.

Providers may not be bracing themselves for a barrage of criticism from policymakers, but we are far from the top of the list of governmental priorities for support.

Polling of voters demonstrated that education, let alone higher education, just wasn’t at the top of issues that they cared about. When this is combined with the fact that, compared to schools with leaky roofs and a Further Education sector whose funding has been decimated, universities seem pretty awash with cash – and it makes it difficult to gain the buy-in necessary to bring about much-needed reform in the sector.

Without reform, it is highly likely that those who will be hardest hit by challenges linked to a financial crisis will be students who already navigate multiple barriers linked to experiences of inequality.

Whether it be cuts to university access funding, the hours that they will have to work alongside their studies, or a lack of subject breadth available to study locally due to course closures, we would be naive to assume that these challenges wouldn’t be compounded for students who have fewer cultural, social and economic opportunities afforded to them to begin with.

It leaves us facing the possibility that, without these students being robustly advocated for in conversations linked to policy and practice, any progress made in greater equity of opportunity to date could unravel quickly and significantly.

Opportunities

But where there are threats and challenges, there are also opportunities – for a bold, innovative approach to the ways in which we meet them.

It would be fair to say that, at times, the sector may have rested on laurels with regard to fair access and participation. Generally speaking, the Blairite goal of “getting more bright poor kids” to university has succeeded. We’ve seen a massive expansion of student numbers, and a significant increase in the diversity of the sector in terms of types and sizes of institution.

However, it has also become painfully obvious that this isn’t enough. For our sector to truly fulfil its potential, we need to demonstrate how it can be achieved through enabling opportunity. The conversation about this to some degree has already begun. In December John Blake, announced his vision for the future of collaborative outreach. Within this was greater focus on regional partnerships as cornerstones in our national efforts to tackle inequity of opportunity.

Within the ocean of policy decisions facing the new government, this is just a ripple. DfE has consultations on on the school curriculum and school inspections, there’s a delay in the rollout of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, and serious thought is being given toward a National Youth Strategy.

For those of us who work as professionals in university access and participation, the capacity for our work to contribute to the generation of civic, social and economic opportunities are readily apparent.

But when it comes to the articulation of higher education’s value, our significant efforts are often overlooked or untapped. As a community, we convened at the FACE Summit to mobilise and become larger than the sum of our parts – to, as a collective, begin to proactively engage in policy issues which directly impact upon on the lives of people, young and old, who we have made it our vocation to support.

That means creatively and innovatively engaging with the role of universities in meeting the challenges presented in wider society, and to be bold in our articulation of a fairer, more equitable future.

If the sector wishes to robustly demonstrate how it breaks down barriers to opportunity, talking to us would be a very good place to start.

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February 4, 2025
Shaping higher education for commuter students

For the first time, there are now more commuter students in the UK – students who continue to live at home whilst studying, rather than relocating to attend university – than traditional residential students.

Surprised? You’re not alone. My research on commuter students suggests that even commuter students themselves don’t realise that there are others like them. In common with most of those who shape higher education pedagogy, policy, practices and plans for the future, they believe that they are a minority, an anomaly, inconsistent with the (presumed) majority of “normal,” residential students.

The sector is increasingly waking up to the needs and experiences of commuter students, supported by the inclusion of commuters in the Office for Students Equality of Opportunity Risk Register in England – Emma Maslin has explored this further on the site.

It is essential, for students, higher education institutions and the future viability of our sector, that we increase awareness of commuter students – who they are and what they need – and that we reshape higher education provision for this growing cohort.

Students will benefit from a better experience and outcomes. Institutions will benefit from higher retention, league table position and therefore recruitment. The sector as a whole will benefit from greater financial stability and clear evidence to the government that we are meeting their priorities and truly expanding access and improving outcomes for non-traditional students.

Who commutes – and why?

Commuter students are diverse. However, there is a strong correlation between being a non-traditional student – those targeted by widening participation initiatives – and being a commuter student.

This is because many of the reasons that students have historically been unable or unwilling to enrol in higher education are the same as those that make them unable or unwilling to relocate. These include affordability, being first in family to higher education, from a low-participation neighbourhood, having caring or family commitments, over 25. Commuters are also likely to be in employment, be home owners, to be studying part time, at lower-tariff universities. Finally, my research suggests that commuter students are more likely to be local students, not long-distance learners.

This said, commuting isn’t always about widening participation. It is likely that the undersupply of student accommodation and resultant increasing prices, alongside the cost-of-living crisis, are encouraging traditional students to remain at home. There is also evidence to suggest that international and postgraduate students are more likely to be commuters, both key target markets for UK higher education institutions.

Relocation as a predictor of success

But why does this matter? Data tell us that commuter students have a poorer experience throughout the student lifecycle. Choice of institution, access to learning, resources, support and extra-curricular activities, are all restricted. Commuters are less able to engage with in-person learning activities and are isolated from their learning community.

They feel less a sense of belonging, more a sense of burden. In consequence, commuter students have lower attainment, continuation and graduate outcomes than their residential counterparts.

In part, this is because higher education has been designed without consideration of the need to travel. Pedagogy, policy and processes have historically been and continue to be shaped around residential students. Assessments, extracurricular activities, facilities, learning and wellbeing support, teaching activities, timetabling—all continue to be premised on the residential model, structured for the residential student, provided at a time and in a place that assumes that students live on or near to campus.

What next?

The first step is to see our commuters. Count them, to make them count. Make them visible, not only to decision makers and practitioners, but also to each other. Provide information for commuters, before, during and after application. Create a sense of belonging, building community through awareness, acceptance and actions such as repurposing unused parts of the estate, for commuter students – a common room, sleeping areas.

Next, review all policies for accessibility, with particular focus on timetabling, attendance, learning and teaching, support services and skills development.

Make changes where necessary, enabling students to maximise access, whilst minimising travel. Rethink in-person learning and make attendance worth it. Consider online learning, but avoid hybrid learning and include on-commute learning options.

Myth busting

For commuter students, access to learning isn’t just about distance. It’s not even just about transport. We need to look at the acceptability, accessibility, affordability and availability of transport. However, we also need to recognise that access and participation are also about students’ activities, responsibilities and relationships, outside of the classroom.

The data tell us that our commuter students are struggling to adapt to pedagogy, policies and practices that are based on the assumption that they will relocate to attend university. Our ability to adapt our provision to their needs is likely to be key to the future sustainability of many of our institutions, if not the sector as a whole.

This article is the first in our series on commuter students where we’ll explore their student journey and what support institutions and the sector can provide to enhance their experience. If you’d like to get involved in the series, we’d welcome further contributions, email [email protected] to pitch us an article.

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February 2, 2025
Widening access needs more flexibility

It has been reported that decision to lower the fee cap on foundation year fees may lead some providers reluctantly to withdraw from that provision, while others will continue to offer those courses at a loss.

In November, the Office for Students’ Director for Fair Access and Participation announced that the access mission would renew its focus upon “ensuring universities and colleges can play their part in giving all aspiring students the opportunity to gain the knowledge, skills and experiences they need to be confident in the choices they make on their pathway to achieving their aspirations, at multiple points along their journey”.

There is clearly a strong appetite among providers, policymakers and regulators to enhance efforts to promote access in line with the Secretary of State’s emphasis on the importance of widening participation as an instrument of social mobility.

During 2024, we at QAA published a range of resources and policy papers supporting this access agenda, including work on degree apprenticeships, lifelong learning, awarding gaps and credit transfer. We also in 2024 celebrated the registration of the millionth student onto an Access to Higher Education Diploma (AHE) course since we started managing the scheme for the recognition and quality assurance of this provision in 1997.

All about access

This qualification is widely recognised in universities’ entry criteria as an alternative to more traditional Level 3 qualifications such as A Levels and BTECs. It is designed to cater for learners from diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds and to offer degrees of flexibility to suit the lifestyles of these returners to learning – who often devote their time and energies to family and work commitments on top of their studies.

AHE provision makes a significant contribution to widening participation. Each year around five per cent of all UCAS applications come from AHE students. More than 36,000 students are currently registered on AHE courses.

The latest figures show that 19,320 AHE students were accepted for entry into higher education in 2023. Nearly a quarter of those progressed to nursing and midwifery courses, and another 23 per cent to programmes in health and social care.

Twenty-four per cent of 2023’s cohort of AHE students entering higher education came from areas of disadvantage – compared with only 11 per cent of students with other Level 3 qualifications entering HE. Fifty-two per cent of that Access cohort entering HE were over 25 years old, compared with just 11 per cent of students with other Level 3 qualifications. These people have overcome barriers to participation in practice and in droves.

Understanding the barriers

We recently conducted a survey of more than 700 Access students. We asked what barriers they had perceived when considering applying for their course. Our research revealed their concerns had often focused on the amount of time they would need to devote to their studies. Those aged 20-34 identified the cost of living as having been a key consideration, while those aged over 35 were more worried about the impact their studies would have on their families and their family lives.

New research conducted by Laser Learning Awards has found that 48.3 per cent of 116 of their own AHE students surveyed saw family commitments as a barrier to learning, and 31.3 per cent identified carer responsibilities – while 63.2 per cent flagged work scheduling issues.

These findings chimed with a recent Open University study which found that, although nearly two-thirds of mothers aspire to retrain for new careers, anxieties about money, time and parental responsibilities tend to hold them back. As about three-quarters of AHE students are female, it seems likely that they experience similar barriers.

Flexibility is key

It is increasingly vital to address these barriers to widening participation: not simply by offering access routes but by ensuring that those routes are sufficiently flexible to be viable for aspiring learners. These flexibilities may, for example, take place through varying modes, paces and dates of delivery.

The Covid-19 crisis taught providers across the tertiary sector ways to deliver programmes online. Now, online engagement can free learners with busy schedules and finite resources from time-constraints and from the costs of travel. Remote and hybrid study modes have proven increasingly popular with AHE students.

Part-time study can also help to overcome barriers facing non-traditional learners. In 2018-19, only 16 per cent of AHE students were studying part-time. But in the three years following the 2020 lockdown the proportion of part-timers increased from less than a third to more than half of all AHE learners.

During 2023-24, 54 per cent of AHE students paced their learning over more than a single academic year, often spreading their studies over about 18 months. The proportion of part-time Access learners peaked at this point – right at the height of the cost-of-living crisis, a period during which learners often needed to increase their working hours and to limit their childcare costs. This current academic year, with inflationary pressures somewhat diminished, our proportion of part-time learners has settled at 42 per cent – the same level as two years ago – and more than two-and-a-half times what it was six years ago.

AHE providers have found value in offering January start-dates, affording part-time learners the opportunity to synchronize with traditional autumn starts as they progress into higher education. Of approximately 1,300 AHE courses running this year, 180 are currently open to new registrations commencing in early 2025.

As we continue to learn the value of flexibilities in overcoming the barriers to widening participation, we hope such lessons will help to inform the development of policies and strategies designed to promote higher education’s value as a key driver of social mobility and to transform learners’ lives.

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January 14, 2025
It’s time to decolonise the awarding gap
Universities and academics working towards racial justice and inclusion education focus their efforts on closing ethnicity awarding gaps, a measure of systematic inequality in student outcomes.

While addressing these inequalities are essential, the concept of the awarding gap itself — particularly when it relates to race — carries problematic assumptions that undermine the broader efforts to address systemic inequities.

Before going forward, It is important to acknowledge that decolonisation is a controversial concept in its own right. I write from the perspective of UK HE, where decolonisation is a commonly used term. My perspective is therefore through the lens of the coloniser, not the colonised, and informed primarily by the legacy of historical British colonial activity. The issues may differ in the context of colonial expansion by other European powers.

Many contemporary global conflicts are colonial in nature, so I also recognised that for many these issues represent lived experience and ongoing trauma. However, the language of decolonisation is widespread in contemporary HE, so I use this term while acknowledging its limitations and tensions.

The awarding gap explained

The awarding gap measures the disparity in first class and upper second class degree outcomes, typically expressed as the percentage difference between the groups. For example, if 75 per cent of white students and only 60 per cent of Asian students earn a first or a 2:1, the Asian awarding gap is 15 per cent. In the UK the global majority awarding gap is widespread and stubbornly persistent. At sector level, there is a 18.5 per cent Black awarding gap and 5.7 per cent Asian awarding gap, and progress on the issue is notoriously slow.

The awarding gap can have a significant impact on student futures. If employers require at least a 2:1 then there will be an inevitable bias against Black and Asian graduates in the workplace. Inequity in undergraduate degree outcomes also restricts access to postgraduate education, reinforcing the loss of global majority talent. Addressing the awarding gap is therefore essential not only for equity of student outcomes, but also for increasing diversity within HE and the graduate workforce.

The colonial origins of awarding gap language

While the awarding gap metric is crucial for highlighting disparities, it is also fraught with issues. The terminology used to describe racial disparities in HE, such as “BAME” (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic), is highly contested. The UK government has abandoned “BAME” in favour of more nuanced categories, and HE should do the same. I prefer the term “global majority students,” following Rosemary Campbell-Stephens, but acknowledge that even this term may be problematic.

The racial categories used in HE such as “Black” and “Asian,” also have deeply problematic origins that many may be unaware of. These can be traced back to the groundbreaking work on biological classification of Carl Linneas, who as well as classifying plants and animals proposed “scientific” groupings of humans along racial lines. His 1735 work ‘Systema naturae’ classified humans into Europaeus albus (European white), Americanus rubescens (American reddish), Asiaticus fuscus (Asian tawny) and Africanus niger (African black). These were placed into a racial hierarchy, with “Africanus niger” at the bottom.

These groupings were accompanied with highly offensive descriptions; Africanus niger was described as “lazy … sly, sluggish,” while Asiaticus fucus were considered “stern, haughty, greedy.” These categories, based on pseudoscientific ideas of race, underpinned centuries of discrimination and oppression. Although modern genetics has debunked the notion of biological races, HE institutions continue to use similar categories, perpetuating a colonial mindset.

Contemporary issues with the awarding gap

The contemporary use of these terms also creates significant issues both practically and philosophically. For instance, the term “Asian” in the UK awarding gap context as defined by the Office for Students refers to UK-born or educated students of Asian heritage, not international students from Asia. This exclusion of international students from the awarding gap is justified by linking the metric to home undergraduate tuition fees, but it also reflects a colonial mindset where non-UK students’ outcomes are disregarded, despite their financial contributions.

Within home student data, crude categorisation also causes issues. For instance, Chinese students have higher outcomes than Pakistani and Bangladeshi students, yet they are all grouped under “Asian” in many HE metrics (although some institutions have started to disaggregate this data). Similarly, the term “white” encompasses diverse groups, including Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller communities, who are among the most excluded from education in the UK but are aggregated into “white”. These administrative categories erase the nuances and intersections of race, culture, and socio-economic background, which may compromise the effectiveness of interventions.

The grouping inherent in the awarding gap model often reinforces deficit thinking, where students from underrepresented racial groups are viewed as lacking in some way. The assumption is that global majority students are underperforming, but we should also question whether it is white students that are systematically over-rewarded by HE institutions. While the language shift from “attainment gap” to “awarding gap” is a step towards acknowledging institutional bias, much more needs to be done.

A 2021 analysis of UK Access and Participation Plans found that most interventions focused on student finance or study skills support, rather than examining institutional processes like assessment and grading. This approach perpetuates the idea that the problem lies with the students, not the institutions.

Decolonising the awarding gap

To address these issues, I propose six strategies for decolonising the awarding gap:
1. Be critical of the metric itself: We need to question the construction of the awarding gap metric, particularly its use of crude categories and hierarchical assumptions. The current framework oversimplifies the complexities of race and ethnicity, leading to ineffective solutions.
2. Disaggregate data: Institutions should disaggregate ethnicity data into the most nuanced categories possible while maintaining statistical validity. Intersectional analysis should be incorporated to capture the full scope of students’ experiences and identities.
3. Move beyond “gap gazing”: Simply identifying the gap is not enough. We need a qualitative understanding of why these gaps exist, grounded in the lived experiences of students. And more importantly to act with urgency, not to wait for more data.
4. Avoid deficit models: Interventions should focus on changing university processes, pedagogies, and assessment methods to be more inclusive for all students, rather than assuming that certain groups are inherently deficient.
5. Involve students: Students must be integral to efforts to address the awarding gap. Institutions should work “with” students, not “for” them, ensuring that their voices are central in both understanding the gap and designing solutions.
6. Engage senior leaders: Institutional leaders must take an active role in addressing the awarding gap. This work cannot be seen as a box-ticking exercise; it requires a deep understanding of the issues and a commitment to systemic change.
The awarding gap, as currently constructed, is a flawed and crude tool for addressing racial disparities in HE. Its colonial underpinnings and reliance on outdated racial categories reinforce the very inequalities we aim to dismantle. To make meaningful progress towards racial justice in education, we must critically engage with the metrics we use and adopt more nuanced, inclusive approaches.

Only by decolonising the awarding gap can we begin to address the deep-seated inequities in HE and create a more just educational system for all.
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January 8, 2025