Category: Access & WP

What works for supporting student access and success when there’s no money?

In 2021 AdvanceHE published our literature review which set out to demonstrate significant impact in access, retention, attainment and progression from 2016–21.

Our aim was to help institutional decision making and improve student success outcomes. This literature has helped to develop intervention strategies in Access and Participation Plans. But the HE world has changed since review and publication.

Recent sector data for England showed that 43 per cent of higher education providers sampled by the Office for Students (OfS) were forecasting a deficit for 2024–25 and concluded that:

Many institutions have ongoing cost reduction programmes to help underpin their financial sustainability. Some are reducing the number of courses they offer, while others are selling assets that are no longer needed.

All the while, institutions are, quite rightly, under pressure to maintain and enhance student success.

The findings of our 2021 review represent a time, not so long ago, when interventions could be designed and tested without the theorising and evaluation now prescribed by OfS. We presented a suite of options to encourage innovation and experimentation. Decision making now feels somewhat different. Many institutions will be asking “what works now, as we find ourselves in a period of financial challenge and uncertainty?”

Mattering still matters

The overarching theme of “mattering” (France and Finney 2009, among others) was apparent in the interventions we analysed in the 2021 review. At its simplest, this is interventions or approaches which demonstrate to students that their university cares about them; that they matter. This can be manifest in the interactions they have with staff, with systems and processes, with each other; with the approaches to teaching that are adopted; with the messages (implicit and explicit) that the institution communicates.

Arguably, a core aspect of mattering is “free” in terms of hard cash – us showing students that we care about them, their experience, and their progress, for staff to have a friendly approach, a regular check in, and meaningful and genuine dialogue with students. Such interactions may well carry an emotional cost however, and how staff are feeling – whether they feel that they matter to the institution – could impact on morale and potentially make this more difficult. We should also be mindful of the gendered labour that can be evident when teaching academics are encouraged to pick up more “pastoral” care of students; in research-intensive institutions, this may be more apparent when a greater proportion of female staff are employed on teaching focused contracts.

In our original review we found that there were clear relationships between each student outcome area – access, retention, attainment and progression – and some interventions had impact on more than one outcome. Here are five of our examples, within the overarching theme of mattering, which remind the sector of this impact evidence whilst illustrating developments in thinking and implementation.

Five impactful practices

Interventions which provide financial aid or assistance to students pre and post entry were evidenced as impactful in the 2016-2021 literature. We remember the necessity of providing financial aid for students during Covid, with the government even providing additional funding for students in need. In the current financial climate, the provision of extra funding may feel like a dream for many institutions. Cost reduction pressures may mean that reducing sizable student support budgets are an easy short-term win to balance the books.

In fact late last year, Jim Dickinson predicted just this as the first wave APPs referenced a likely decline in financial support. As evaluative data has shown, hardship funding is used by students to fund the cost of living. When money is tight, an alternative approach is to apply targeted aid where there is evidence of known disadvantage. Historically the sector has not been great at targeting, but it has become a necessity. Preventing student withdrawal has never been more important.

We also noted that early interventions delivered pre-entry and during transition and induction were particularly effective. The sector has positioned early and foundational experiences of students as crucial for many years. When discussions about cost effectiveness look to models of student support, targeting investment in the early years of study, rather than universally applied, could have the highest impact. Continuation metrics (year one to year two retention) again drive this thinking, with discrete interventions being the simplest to evaluate but perhaps the most costly to resource. Billy Wong’s new evidence exploring an online transition module and associated continuation impact is a pertinent example of upfront design costs (creation), low delivery costs (online), and good impact (continuation).

Another potentially low cost intervention is the design of early “low stakes” assessment opportunities that give students the chance to have early successes and early helpful feedback which, if well designed, can support students feeling that they matter. These types of assessments can support student resilience and increase the likelihood of them continuing their studies, as well as providing the institution with timely learner analytics regarding who may be in need of extra support (a key flag for potential at-risk students being non-completion of assessments). This itself is a cost saving measure as it enables the prioritisation of intervention and resource where the need is likely to be greatest.

Pedagogically driven interventions were shown in our review to have an impact across student outcome areas. This included the purposeful design of the student’s curriculum to impact on student learning, attainment, and future progression. Many institutions are embarking on large scale curriculum change with an efficiency (and student experience/outcomes) lens. Thinking long term enough to avoid future change, yet attending to short term needs is a constant battle, as is retaining conversations of values and pedagogy.

How we teach is perhaps one of the most powerful and “cost-free” mechanisms available, given many students may prioritise what time they can spend on campus towards attending taught sessions. An extremely common concern expressed by new (and not so new) lecturers and GTAs when encouraged to interact with students in their teaching is “But what if I get asked a question that I don’t know the answer to?” Without development and support, this fear (along with an understandable assumption that their role is to “transmit” knowledge) often results in a retreat to didactic, content heavy approaches, a safe space for the expert in the room.

But participative sessions that embed inclusive teaching, relational and compassionate pedagogies, that create a sense of community in the classroom where contributions are valued and encouraged, where students get to know each other and us – all such approaches can show students that they matter and support their experience and their success.

We also found that interventions which provided personal support and guidance for students impacted positively on student outcomes. One to one support can be impactful but costly. Adaptations in delivery or approach, for example, small group rather than individual sessions and models of peer support are worth exploring in a resource sensitive environment. Embedding personal and academic support within course delivery and operating an effective referral system for students when needed, is another way to get the most out of existing resources.

Finally, the effective use of learner analytics was a common theme in our review of impact. Certainly, the proactive use of data to support the identification of student need/risk makes good moral and financial sense. However, large scale investment might be necessary to realise longer term financial gains. This might be an extension of existing infrastructure or as Peck, McCarthy and Shaw recently suggested, HE institutions might turn to AI to play a major role in recognising students who are vulnerable or in distress.

Confronting the hidden costs

These financial dilemmas may feel uncomfortable; someone ultimately gains less (loses out?) in a targeted approach to enhancing student success. Equality of opportunity and outcome gaps alongside financial transparency should be at the forefront of difficult decisions (use equality legislation on positive action to underpin targeting decisions as needed). Evaluation, and learning from the findings, become even more important in the context of scarce resources. While quick decisions to realise financial savings may seem attractive, a critical eye on the what works evidence base is essential to have long term impact.

Beyond our AHE review, TASO has a useful evidence toolkit which notes cost alongside assumed impact and the strength of the evidence. As an example, the provision of information, advice and guidance and work experience are cited as low cost (one star), with high-ish impact (two stars). This evidence base only references specific evidence types (namely causal/type three evidence). The series of evidence-based frameworks (such as Student Success, Employability, Inclusive Practice) from AdvanceHE are alternative reference points.

The caveat to all of the above is that new approaches carry a staff development cost. In fact, all of the “low cost” interventions and approaches cited need investment in the development and support of academic staff. We are often supported by brilliant teams of learning designers and educational developers, but they cannot do all this heavy lifting on their own given the scale of the task ahead. As significant challenges like AI ask us to fundamentally rethink our purpose as educators in higher education, perhaps staff development is what we should be investing in now more than ever?

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August 13, 2025
Just 329 students with an EHCP got to a high tariff provider last year

Everyone who can benefit from higher education deserves to do so. That’s pretty much what people remember the Robbins report as saying – and it is a comforting story that higher education likes to tell itself.

But it doesn’t really hold true in the experiences of an increasingly diverse pool of potential applicants.

The state of the art of supporting and regulating fair access to (and participation in) higher education in England has moved far beyond the (rather unsophisticated) idea of national targets and metrics. Like it or loathe it, the risk-based approach taken by the Office for Students is commendably grounded both in the experience of individual students and the academic literature.

However a weakness of this approach is the temptation to argue that any access gaps represent a failure of higher education providers rather than taking a whole system (educational and, indeed socio-economic) perspective. When we do glance at wider problems with, say schools attainment it may not always be universities that are best placed (or adequately supported) to address them.

And let us not be coy here – there are gaps:

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The chart shows progression rates to HE, either to all providers or “high tariff providers” (of which more later) for each year since 2009-10. The size of the dots represent the number of students in that population, the colours represent the groups of characteristics: you get everything from measures of economic disadvantage, to ethnicity, to disability and – new for this year – care experience. We are looking at the students that might usually be expected to enter HE that academic year (so the cohort that turned 18 the previous year – those who took a year out before university or who progress after resits will not be shown as progression to HE).

SEN and EHCP

There’s thousands of potential stories in this data – for this article I’m going to focus on special educational needs (SEN) as a factor influencing progression.

As you can see from the chart 21.1 per cent of students with any special educational need progressed to higher education by the age of 19 in 2023-24. This is the highest on record, but before you break open the champagne we should add that the progression rate for their peers without SEN was more than 50 per cent. And for progression to high tariff providers the gap is even starker: 14.9 per cent without SEN, 3.8 with.

Though a traditional image of a student with SEN may be of someone who is less academically able, there are many very academically inclined students who have SEN and are able to progress to any destination you can think of if they can access the right support. Support is not exactly easy to come by, and it is very much a lottery whether support is available to a particular child or not. Progression to any higher education setting by 19 was 25.4 per cent for those with SEN who had more generalised support, and just 9.4 for those who managed to get an education, health, and care plan (EHCP).

Again, the experience of pupils with an EHCP may make it more likely that they apply later on (and thus not feature in their cohort data) – those who do progress often need to top up their level 2 or 3 qualifications before being able to progress to the next level of study, all of which takes time.

But just 1.5 per cent of students with an EHCP, 327 students, progressed to a high tariff provider. To me, that’s a systemic failing.

Regional dimensions

More so than any other characteristic, where you live (and, more germanely, where you go to school) has a huge impact on your educational experience with SEN. In Kensington and Chelsea, 45.5 per cent of students with SEN are in HE by the age of 19. In Thurrock, the figure is more like 10 per cent.

The variation is similar for all students – 71 per cent get to university in Redbridge, 26 per cent in Knowsley.

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But this core variation (which covers everything from socio-economic status to school quality to aspirations) is overlaid by the varying proportions of students with SEN in each area, and the varying levels (and quality) of the support that can be provided.

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Some 23.3 per cent of all students in Middlesbrough have a SEN marker. In Havering the figure is 8.85 per cent (there are some outliers with low numbers of students in total)

What is being done?

As Alex Grady of nasen wrote on the UCAS blog earlier this year, the many misconceptions around SEN indicating some form of “learning difficulty” that makes higher education irrelevant or impossible still persist. Students with SEN very often flourish at university, but the assumption that they will not attend higher education – so thinking around support through and beyond the transition between compulsory education and higher education often happens late or in a piecemeal fashion.

It is comparatively rare for a university to visit a non-mainstream school, or vice-versa. There are many reasons (not least financial) for this not to happen, but there is a clear benefit to introducing students from all settings to a range of post-compulsory routes early and often. Sometimes special schools and other alternate provision partner with larger local schools to make this happen.

Student records do not transition neatly between the compulsory sector and higher education, a situation not helped by the presumption that an EHCP extends to age 25 if you don’t go to university, but ends if they do (this, beautifully, is considered a “positive outcome”). A student may be used to assuming staff understand the best way to support them (as this is what happened at school) and feel uncomfortable or ill-equipped to effectively argue for similar support in HE.

Universities do address this, both in highlighting the support that they offer students and in signposting what is available via the Disabled Students’ Allowance (many students with SEN do not identify themselves as “disabled”, and the variations in terminology are a recognised issue). But schools also have a role to play in preparing students for an application and choice experience that is pretty bewildering for all students.

Additional data

The DfE Widening Participation release is the only place where you get a definition of a “high tariff” provider – in 2023-24 this term referred to higher education providers with a mean tariff of 125.8 or above (last year this was 129.4).

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July 31, 2025
To make real progress on widening participation in higher education, we need a new mission

The promise of higher education as a pathway to opportunity has never been more important, or more precarious.

While overall university participation has reached record levels, this headline figure masks a troubling reality: where you’re born in England increasingly determines whether you’ll ever set foot on a university campus. And even once students do get their foot in the door, they might not have the support system in place – financially as well as academically – to succeed and thrive.

It is in this context that the UPP Foundation has today published the concluding paper in its widening participation inquiry. Mission Critical: six recommendations for the widening participation agenda is our attempt to fill in the gaps that the government left in its opportunity mission around widening participation, and to provide targets and mechanisms by which it can achieve success in this area.

Doing “getting in” right

For years, the biggest single aim of widening participation work has been “getting in” – ensuring that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are supported to attend university, most often by undertaking a bachelor’s degree as a residential student. The aim of growing participation has come under political scrutiny in recent years and is no longer an accepted mission across the political spectrum.

But as our inquiry’s earlier papers highlight, there remains significant gaps in participation. Although more young people are going to university than ever before, there are stark disparities in the rates at which young people from different parts of the country attend university. If we believe, as I do, that talent is not simply concentrated in London and the South East, then by implication if opportunity is spread out more evenly, participation in higher education needs to grow.

That’s why our first recommendation is a “triple lock” widening participation target. This includes a gap of no more than ten percentage points between the highest and lowest regional HE participation rates; plus a 50 per cent floor for progression to HE at 18-19 across all regions; and a target for 70 per cent of the whole English population to have studied at level 4 or above by the age of 25, as advocated by Universities UK. Meeting these targets will ensure that “getting in” really is for everyone.

Onwards and upwards

But this is not enough in isolation. The people we spoke to in Doncaster and Nottingham made it clear that “getting on” and “getting out” are equally important parts of the widening participation struggle – with the cost of learning a major barrier to full participation in university life.

With that in mind, we’re calling for the restoration of maintenance loans to 2021 real-terms levels by the end of the decade, as well as additional maintenance grants for those eligible for free school meals in the last six years.

We also want universities that are currently spending millions of pounds on bursaries and hardship funds to put that money towards outreach in the most challenging cold spots, as well as ensuring that the wider student experiences that undergrads cherish are available to all. That’s why it makes sense for a proportion of the proceeds from the proposed international student fee levy, if introduced, to be ring fenced to support an expanded access and participation plan regime, prioritising disadvantaged students from cold spot backgrounds.

Revitalisation

Finally, widening participation needs to address the short-term mindset that grips young people both before and during their time at university.

Young people are more mindful of their finances than ever before, with many opting out of university in favour of a job in places where graduate careers are scarce and those who do choose to attend keeping one eye on their present and future earnings even before they’ve graduated.

If we are to revitalise the widening participation agenda, we have to bring employability to the fore, both by reconfiguring the Office for Students’ B3 metric on positive student outcomes and by bringing employers into the design and outputs of university study. There are already fantastic examples of this working in practice across the sector, such as at London South Bank’s energy advice centre and Bristol University’s career- and community-oriented dental school. It’s time for the sector to pick up these ideas and run with them.

The young person in Doncaster with the same grades and aspirations as their counterpart in Surrey faces not just different odds of getting to university, but different expectations about what’s possible. When we fail to address these disparities, we’re not just perpetuating inequality, we’re actively weakening the economic foundations that the whole country depends on.

What our new report offers is a chance to refocus the widening participation agenda around a series of ambitious but achievable targets. Getting in, getting on and getting out are all crucial parts of the higher education cycle, especially for those who otherwise wouldn’t attend. If the government want to take their widening participation priorities seriously, all three aspects need to take their place in the sun.

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July 7, 2025
The crisis in the youth sector is a big problem for universities

It is hard for universities to see beyond their own sector crisis right now, but the crisis facing the youth sector today will be the problem of universities tomorrow.

The youth sector in the UK greatly contributes towards supporting students and graduates of the future, but it is currently under threat and the deepest impact will come for those young people who face the highest barriers to accessing higher education.

The youth sector engages young people to develop their critical skills for life, including how to build relationships with peers; resilience and developing social and emotional skills; and how to integrate into a community. Many within the higher education sector will recognise these as areas which students and graduates are also struggling with.

At a time where universities are being called upon to widen access for young people, the reality is young people are facing narrower opportunities than ever. The challenge for widening participation teams will be multifaceted, including supporting attainment raising in schools; tackling entrenched views from schools and families of expectations of what their children can achieve; and providing the support needed for widening participation students to progress well once in higher education.

So how can the higher education sector help ensure that the challenges the youth sector are facing today don’t become a nightmare for widening participation teams to tackle in the future?

What is happening in the youth sector?

The youth sector includes large organisations such as UK Youth, Scouts and Girlguiding, to smaller grassroots organisations who run clubs and activities in and out of schools and community centres across the country.

There are many similarities between the crises facing the higher education sector and that of the youth sector. Much like universities, the youth sector has faced years of substantial defunding. A YMCA England and Wales report on The state of funding for youth services found that “local authority expenditure on youth services has fallen 73% in England and 27% in Wales since 2010-11” which “represents a real-term cut of £1.2bn to youth services between 2010-11 to 2023-24 in England, and £16.6m in Wales.”

At the same time as these cuts, the rate of young people who are NEET (not in education, employment or training) is growing, with 13.2 per cent of 16-24 year olds reported as NEET in 2024, and 15.6 per cent of 18-24 year olds NEET. Both figures have increased compared to previous years, particularly in young men. These young people need support and youth services are increasingly unable to provide it.

Organisations and charities who have been supporting the youth sector are closing at a rapid rate. The National Citizen Service (NCS), a national youth social action programme which has been running since 2009, has been cut by the Labour Government. Student Hubs, the social action charity I worked with which supported students to engage in social and environmental action, has closed. YMCA George Williams College, an organisation which supported the youth sector to improve monitoring, evaluation and impact of their activities closed on 31 March 2025 to the shock of many across the youth sector.

Whilst the Government’s National Youth Strategy announced in November 2024 is welcome, it will not fix years of systematic underfunding of youth sector services.

How will this crisis impact universities?

David Kernohan’s analysis of the UCAS 2025 application figures shows that applications are down, with only applicants from the most advantaged quintile, IMD quintile 5, having improved. We are in the midst of what could be a big decline in the rate of students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds entering higher education, despite the transformative opportunities it provides.

This comes at a time where there is greater expectation by the government and the regulator for universities to be proactive in supporting students’ and young people’s skills, learning and access to opportunity. In February the Office for Students announced successful providers in their latest funding round to deliver projects which tackle Equality of Opportunity Risk Register areas. The register supports universities to consider barriers in the student life cycle and how they might mitigate against these.

Seeing the range of projects which have been awarded funding, it is clear that universities are being pushed to go further in imagining what their role is in shaping the lives of the students they engage, and it starts significantly earlier than freshers’ week. This funding shows that more emphasis is being put on universities to address barriers to participation by the Office for Students, and with the youth sector in crisis, this may need to become even wider if universities are to fulfil their access missions.

Thankfully, there are actions universities can take now which will make a difference both to young people and widening participation teams.

Tackling the problems together

The youth sector cannot afford to wait. If universities want to be ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow, they need to build strong collaborative relationships with organisations already situated in communities whilst they are still here. Partnership with the youth sector offers an opportunity to enhance university strategic activity whilst making genuine social and economic impact.

Universities could be doing more to provide expertise on monitoring and evaluation of youth activities, enhancing quality of local activities, and conducting research to support future outcomes. There’s an opportunity for universities to learn from these partnerships too, particularly because the youth sector has a range of expertise which is highly applicable to the work the sector is doing in broadening their widening participation and civic strategies. These partnerships will sometimes be informal and sometimes they might be formalised through knowledge exchange programmes like student consultancy.

Students can play a big role in linking universities and youth services. Research conducted by the National Youth Agency in 2024 found “that fewer than seven per cent of respondents to a national survey of youth workers are under 26 years old”. There is a desperate need for youth workers and particularly under-30s to support the sector. Student Hubs’ legacy resources detail the approach we took to supporting students to volunteer in local schools, libraries and community centres to provide free support to young people as part of place-based programmes with universities.

Universities and students’ unions have spaces they are looking to commercialise, whilst also trying to give students jobs on campus. Universities and students’ unions could work collaboratively with community groups to use spaces on campus, provide student work through staffing them, and in turn support young people and families to access campus facilities.

The time is now

One of the hallmarks of a crisis is communities coming together to meet challenges head on, and universities shouldn’t wait to be invited. Trust will need to be built and relationships take time to forge.

The best time to start is now. Universities should mobilise whilst there is still a youth sector left to support, or the void left by the lack of youth services means universities’ involvement in young people’s lives is going to become even larger.

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July 2, 2025
Social mobility needs a whole-university rethink

For more than two decades, widening access has been the sector’s flagship social mobility project. But what if that narrow focus is holding us back?

A new report from the Social Market Foundation, Leave to Achieve?, urges us to think more expansively. Sponsored by the University of Warwick and the University of Southampton, the project was commissioned to recognise and champion the significant work that universities already do to improve social mobility. This report presents a positive picture with some excellent case studies of good practice. Yet we wanted to challenge the status quo by posing a new question of how this role could be further strengthened in an evolving political, economic and demographic landscape.

It’s a timely intervention. In November 2024, the Secretary of State for Education wrote to university leaders setting out five clear priorities: improved access and outcomes for disadvantaged students, stronger civic engagement, enhanced contributions to economic growth, higher teaching standards, and greater financial efficiency. Leave to Achieve? presents a compelling blueprint for how institutions might meet that challenge – not by doing more of the same, but by doing things differently.

Getting in isn’t the same as getting on

Yes, disadvantaged students are more likely to go to university than they were 20 years ago. But gaps remain – especially at high-tariff providers, where the life-changing graduate premium is highest. And even when disadvantaged students do get in, they’re less likely to complete, more likely to graduate with lower-class degrees, and face a persistent class pay gap.

These access gains have also been geographically uneven. In parts of the country, a student’s chances of going to university – let alone a selective one – remain depressingly slim.

This aligns with long-standing evidence from the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission, both of which have consistently highlighted the enduring impact of regional inequality and the limits of “national” mobility narratives. The Social Mobility Commission’s “State of the Nation” reports, for example, show that young people from some post-industrial regions are still far less likely to progress to higher education than their peers elsewhere – despite similar levels of talent and ambition.

The takeaway? Real social mobility is not just about “getting in” – it’s about outcomes, belonging, and fair access to local opportunity.

What about staff?

If universities want to be credible agents of social mobility, we also need to look inward.

The socioeconomic makeup of the university workforce remains largely invisible. Few institutions collect data on the class background of their staff. The 2010 Equality Act doesn’t treat social class as a protected characteristic, so there’s no legal driver to act, and no institutional accountability.

This gap has been highlighted in HEPI’s recent work on equity in academic careers, which shows that the absence of robust data on social class in recruitment and promotion processes limits our ability to understand – and address – barriers to entry and progression in the sector.

But this blind spot matters. Academia as a career is often inaccessible to those without a financial safety net. Structural inequalities in postgraduate progression and insecure early-career contracts compound the problem. If our own workforce doesn’t reflect the diversity we champion in student access, what message does that send?

A civic role still waiting to be realised

We often describe universities as anchor institutions. But Leave to Achieve? finds that civic engagement is still too often a patchwork of well-meaning projects rather than a systemic strategy.

Too few universities are meaningfully embedded in local education and skills ecosystems. Too few are co-producing knowledge with communities. And too many are still seen – particularly in more deprived regions – as distant, elite, and not “for people like us.”

This is not just a moral imperative. It’s a political one. The Secretary of State’s 2024 letter was clear: universities must be more visible and valuable in their localities. Delivering on that expectation will require more than community outreach – it will require rethinking institutional purpose.

The Civic University Network and UPP Foundation’s Civic University Agreements have laid important groundwork here. But Leave to Achieve? argues for more consistent policy incentives and accountability mechanisms that can embed civic engagement as a core strategic function across the sector.

Rethinking research impact

Research and innovation are often positioned as universities’ contribution to economic growth. But what if we rethought them as tools for regional social mobility?

The report argues that embedding social equity in research priorities – not just in outputs, but in who defines the questions and who benefits – can help ensure that innovation serves local communities, not just national agendas.

That also means investing in more diverse academic pipelines, better knowledge exchange structures, and partnerships that extend beyond the usual suspects. The Research England-funded Participatory Research Fund is an example of how the research ecosystem can be better aligned with inclusive growth goals.

So what’s next?

The SMF’s recommendations are pragmatic and targeted: a national strategy for social mobility, delivered through regional structures. Legal recognition of social class in equality legislation. Better socioeconomic workforce data. And, crucially, incentives for local recruitment and regional collaboration.

In short, they point to a version of the future that aligns closely with the government’s own vision – if policymakers are willing to resource it. A recent HEPI blog from the Social Market Foundation’s Dani Payne poses some important questions for universities to consider.

This project wasn’t commissioned to critique, but to catalyse. It’s also about recognising what the sector already does well. From transformative widening participation work and contextual admissions schemes to place-based partnerships and pioneering civic strategies, many universities are already expanding opportunity within their regions and communities.

Collaboration is central to this mission. A renewed social mobility agenda must galvanise universities, colleges, employers, charities, and public sector partners to work together to address local and regional need – creating a coherent, joined-up ecosystem of opportunity that supports people to thrive in the places they call home.

The broader message is this: we need a whole-university approach to social mobility. That means moving beyond access targets to consider our roles as employers, civic actors, and knowledge producers. It means recognising that social mobility is about place as much as potential. And it means being honest about what we haven’t yet achieved.

Our goal now is to ensure this debate doesn’t get lost in the long grass, but to extend an arm to the sector and other key actors to develop a long-term shared mission for social mobility.

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June 25, 2025
Reframing student voice through a rights-based lens
Student voice has never been more central to the higher education conversation.

Across the sector, there’s growing consensus that higher education institutions must not only listen to their students but actively build institutions around their insights and experiences.

Yet, for all the best intentions and sincere efforts, turning student feedback into meaningful, institution-wide change remains a challenge.

At the University of Kent, we’ve been reflecting critically on our own approach. Like many, we’ve long celebrated the volume of student engagement we facilitate, such as surveys, focus groups, informal conversations.

But we’ve come to recognise that collecting feedback isn’t the same as using it, and that celebrating the act of “listening” can sometimes obscure a harder truth – we didn’t always know what to do with what we heard.

Reframing student voice through a rights-based lens

Our turning point came through an unlikely source – the work of Professor Laura Lundy. Originally developed to support children’s rights under Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Lundy’s model provides a practical framework for ensuring young people’s voices are not only heard, but also acted upon.

It centres around four interdependent elements – Space, Voice, Audience, and Influence.

We began to ask – what if we adapted this model to the higher education widening participation context?

Applying Lundy’s model in this way helped us shift our thinking from engagement as consultation, to engagement as partnership.

It challenged us to ask harder questions about power, process, and accountability in the way we involved underrepresented students in our outreach and access work.

We already had a thriving cohort of over 300 student ambassadors – many young, idealistic, and deeply committed to helping shape a more inclusive university. But too often, when they shared ambitious or creative ideas, we found ourselves retreating behind operational constraints – “That won’t get through the next committee,” or “It’s a great idea, but we don’t have the budget.”

We weren’t dismissing their input out of disinterest, on the contrary, we were invested. But in practice, without the power to act, we were unintentionally reinforcing the idea that their contributions didn’t lead to change.

Feedback gathered with care and enthusiasm was left to languish in reports and spreadsheets. There was no systematic way of translating insight into action, and no clear feedback loop to close the gap.

Space

The development of our new Access and Participation Plan (APP) back in 2023 offered the ideal opportunity to put this into practice. The Office for Students made student involvement a clear expectation and we chose to go beyond compliance.

In partnership with Kent Students’ Union, we launched a Widening Participation Student Advisory Panel, inspired by a successful model from the University of Southampton. We recruited 25 students, most from underrepresented backgrounds, and built a structure that allowed their contributions to be actioned.

Voice

If we wanted students to play a meaningful role in shaping our widening participation strategy, we had to go beyond asking for ideas. We had to equip them to contribute in an informed way.

That meant building knowledge, not just platforms. We didn’t just ask for feedback, we trained them:
- We explained the regulatory context
- We shared internal data and metrics
- We discussed financial constraints and institutional parameters
- We connected them directly to our APP Operations and Steering Groups
Our aim wasn’t to dampen creativity, but to anchor it in context. Students needed to understand the world they were trying to change. That understanding made their input sharper, more strategic, and ultimately more powerful.

Audience

Students invest time and energy into sharing thoughtful feedback. They deserve more than tokenistic “thank yous” or vague assurances that their views have been “noted.”

We took steps to ensure student voice reached the people who could act on it. That meant involving senior leaders and decision-makers in engagement processes, creating spaces where feedback was taken seriously and visibly discussed and being transparent with students about the limits of our authority, namely what we could or couldn’t change.

One of the students was even elected to sit on the operations group itself, ensuring a direct student voice at the decision-making table.

Honesty builds trust. And trust is the foundation of sustained, meaningful student engagement.

Influence

Acting on feedback is only half the equation. The other half is showing that we acted.

We’ve become intentional about creating “You said, we did” moments: making visible the link between student insight and institutional change.

We’ve made sure those changes are not just confined to our team, but acknowledged at all levels – in committees, in strategic plans, and in senior leadership conversations.

Influence should be traceable. Students should be able to see evidence of their ideas across the university.

One powerful example of student-led change is the revision of the Kent Financial Support Package (KFSP), driven directly by student feedback. We co-created the process by modelling different support options and inviting students to choose the approach they felt was most equitable.

While we initially considered concentrating funds among fewer students, students overwhelmingly voiced the importance of broader support, even though this meant slightly lower individual amounts, to ensure more of their peers could benefit.

They also pushed for smaller changes which would make a big difference, including support for students repeating a year and extended eligibility for those who become estranged during their studies.

We listened, we acted, and now they can see their voices reflected in a policy that benefits future students.

From consultation to co-creation

This is still a work in progress.

But adapting Lundy’s model has helped us ask better questions about how we build student voice into the DNA of our widening participation work. It’s helped us move from hearing students views to embedding them into decision-making, and from consultation to co-creation.

If we’re serious about equitable access and success in higher education, then the voices of those most affected must not be optional extras. They must be at the centre, resourced, respected and able to help shape the institutions they are a part of.
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June 25, 2025
Taking a systematic approach to inclusivity through uncovering the hidden curriculum

Every culture and society have distinct nuances and unspoken, unwritten values, norms and beliefs that influence behaviour, expectations, and life experiences. These evolving dynamics can also influence learning experiences.

Often referred to as the hidden curriculum, these aspects not only affect the way students experience their learning journey but the lasting impact their university experience has on their lives. It is vital, therefore, that anyone working in the sector is aware of these factors as they may impact both the curriculum, and the unintended values and perspectives communicated through the way the staff interact with students.

Educators should not only be aware of the dominant institutional culture but should actively encourage an inclusive learning community that values and embraces the diverse backgrounds and experiences of students and faculty. Drawing students’ attention to these often-overlooked factors can empower them to navigate academic and professional spaces more effectively, helping them reach their full potential.

The hidden curriculum has been shown to play a significant role in fostering moral values, professionalism and humanism in fields like medicine, management and the arts. But we also know that when it’s not implemented carefully, the hidden curriculum can reflect the interests of dominant groups; reinforcing privilege while disadvantaging others, such as those from working-class and marginalised communities. Therefore, we also need to openly analyse and critique the hidden curriculum, by identifying any political implications of specific pedagogic approaches.

When people are not aware of these unspoken values and expectations, they may feel excluded or marginalised, negatively impacting their sense of belonging and therefore their willingness to engage or ability to succeed. We therefore have an obligation to not only teach the hidden, cultural norms themselves, but also foster a critical awareness of them. Encouraging students to adapt while remaining true to their own identities, resulting in an authentic experience for all students, including those with different learning needs – such as neurodivergent individuals – as well as people from different backgrounds or cultures.

We know that a truly internationalised campus requires both institutional initiatives and individual efforts to foster intercultural understanding and collaboration, empowering students and staff to drive change together. But putting this into practice can be tough. As a result, efforts to widen participation have often led to social and academic exclusion, as systems struggle to adapt.

Systematically overcoming the hidden curriculum

Equitable assessments play a key role in overcoming the hidden curriculum. Clear guidance and opportunities to develop assessment literacy helps students to perform to their full potential. For example, if students are to submit a narrated presentation for their assessment, have they had opportunities to learn the required skills and to submit a formative presentation for feedback? Scaffolding the skills they are required to demonstrate, including writing skills, is imperative to student confidence and therefore submission and overall success.

Work placements should also accommodate students’ diverse backgrounds, ensuring inclusivity in workplace culture and expectations. This may include, for example, transport needs or special equipment; where this is the case, both the university and the employer have a responsibility to meet these needs so the student is able to attend their placement and complete their duties in an equitable way, allowing them to feel part of the team.

There should also be clear guidance on what success means. Staff should be aware of the implicit ways they are communicating the institutions and their own expectations. By emphasising grade attainment, they are potentially sending a message that high grades are valued and that those not achieving these grades are less important and/or valuable than those who are. Students who want to impress their lecturers may feel pressure to perform and feel marginalised when they do not achieve the grades they think are expected. To avoid this, staff should be explicit about how overall educational gain is measured and how students can develop their own map for navigating university life and measuring their own development.

On top of this, bringing hidden knowledge, such as vernacular, or higher education jargon, to the surface through tools like shared, and preferably co-created glossaries will help all students, particularly those new to a field, or who speak English as an additional language, feel more included and engaged.

Curriculum and learning design should also follow an intentional approach to foster belonging and encourage discussions about social inequalities – including why they exist and how to overcome them – making students more aware of the world that exists and their role and influence within it.

Fighting against pressures

Despite many institutions working towards overcoming the constraints of the hidden curriculum, there’s still an incessant problem at play. Universities are increasingly expected to embed numerous agendas into their teaching and learning frameworks: equality, sustainability, employability, decolonisation, accessibility and mental well-being – to name a few.

These competing demands can be overwhelming, particularly when trying to implement all these elements into individual modules. This can – and has – led to inefficiencies, confusion and a disconnect between academic content and broader institutional goals. Essentially, we end up stuck in the same position, or even more behind, as staff grapple with balancing traditional academic teaching with the growing list of institutional and societal changes.

It’s no secret that universities need to rethink how to integrate and prioritise all these different elements when teaching. We know inclusion matters to students, yet universities are having to draw back from a lot of their outreach work due to financial pressures, while at the same time fighting against a world that’s seemingly becoming more hostile toward equality, diversity and inclusion efforts. Universities need to relearn how to be inclusive with these constraints – effectively “doing more with less.”

Some have thought to distribute the elements across modules or offer co-curricular opportunities. Some have tried to enforce better levels of transparency in workload expectations for both staff and students, including better time management. And yet the struggle remains.

The steps to crack inclusivity

Trying to finally crack the code to inclusivity requires both top-down institutional strategies and bottom-up approaches that focus on academic and cultural drivers.

There are a few steps which have been found to help, such as investing in ongoing training and awareness programmes, as they provide sustained, comprehensive training on accessibility and inclusion for all staff. Increased awareness may lead to more critical assessments of institutional practices, but it will not diminish personal commitment. It is in these interpersonal interactions in learning, teaching and academic support that the tacit exclusions of the hidden curriculum can be interrogated and challenged.

But institutional staff need back up in the form of a holistic and inclusive institutional culture that values and prioritises inclusivity at all levels. This can be done by promoting accessibility as a core value, which can help the institution remain resilient during times of change or external challenges, and by emphasising inclusivity as a shared responsibility across all departments and roles.

Universities should also strengthen institutional support structures by ensuring staff know who to contact for accessibility issues and can trust institutional processes to provide timely and effective support. It’s important to clarify roles, responsibilities and procedures and develop clear documentation and accessible guidance related to accessibility to reduce confusion and improve responsiveness. It’s also important to avoid narrowly targeted interventions that might neglect or disadvantage certain academics. Sufficient budget and resources should also be allocated to sustain inclusivity initiatives.

As Knight and de Wit argue: “Economic and political rationales are increasingly the key drivers for national policies related to the internationalisation of higher education, while academic and social/cultural motivations are not increasing in importance at the same rate.”

Assessing and adapting inclusive practices in light of the changing external environment is key. Tools like cross-sectional surveys can track staff perceptions of accessibility and inclusion over time. This will help universities to monitor changes in staff confidence, attitudes and knowledge, and address areas of concern through targeted interventions. Universities should always engage with diverse voices, to inform and improve practices, while recognising and addressing external factors, such as legislative changes or global events, which may impact staff confidence and inclusivity efforts.

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June 20, 2025
Causes and consequences of access disparities by ethnicity

If you haven’t looked recently at the stats on the different rates of HE participation by ethnicity, you may find them quite striking.

Today, young people from ethnic minority backgrounds are progressing to university in record numbers.

According to the most recent figures from DfE, the proportion of school pupils in England of white ethnicity who progress to HE by age 19 (41.8 per cent) is comfortably exceeded by the corresponding proportions of school pupils of Asian (68.4 per cent), Black (62.4 per cent) and mixed (51.8 per cent) ethnicity.

White school pupils now also have the lowest progression rate to more selective high tariff universities. Statistics concerning the intersection of ethnicity and socioeconomic background are even more striking – Black school pupils who are also free school meals (FSM) eligible, for example, have a higher HE participation rate (51.3 per cent) than white pupils who are not FSM eligible (45.1 per cent).

Can these gaps be explained?

Whilst as a sector we (quite rightly) focus more on the gap in degree-level attainment by ethnicity (where white students typically outperform those from ethnic minority backgrounds), it is still worth considering why gaps in HE access by ethnicity are so large and what the longer term ramifications of these gaps may be. I recently published a piece of academic research which sought to understand the drivers of HE participation gaps by ethnicity.

This is a much less straightforward task than trying to understand the drivers of disparities in HE participation by socioeconomic background or gender. A number of statistical modelling exercises, using England’s rich administrative datasets, have shown that gaps in HE participation by FSM eligibility and gender tend to almost vanish once average differences in school attainment are controlled for statistically. Of course, this does not excuse such disparities, but it does help us to better understand why they exist.

However, when it comes to the link between ethnicity, school attainment and the likelihood of going to university, the relationship here seems to be far from straightforward. For example, Black school pupils in England get slightly lower grades, on average, in their GCSE exams than their white counterparts. Yet at the same time Black pupils are (quite comfortably) more likely to end up progressing to university. At first glance therefore, these statistics appear somewhat counter-intuitive.

In an analysis of linked National Pupil Database (NPD) and HESA data, I discovered that to better understand overall disparities in HE access by ethnicity, we need to investigate how these disparities vary at different points along the overall school attainment spectrum.

This can be done using a really straightforward method. First, take an entire cohort of all state school pupils in England (I used the one who took their GCSE exams in 2015) and divide them up into five attainment quintiles based on their grades in their best 8 GCSE subjects. Then, within each of these attainment sub-populations, investigate how HE participation varies by ethnicity.

For higher attainers, the results were largely unremarkable. But for those with slightly below average attainment, the results were truly staggering.

The participation gulf for those with lower school attainment

Young people from ethnic minority backgrounds with high attainment are more likely to end up at university than their high-attaining white British counterparts, but only slightly so. For example, 81.2 per cent of those pupils who were both white British and in the highest quintile of attainment ended up at university, compared to 83.3 per cent of high attainers of Black Caribbean ethnicity and 87.7 per cent of high-attainers of Pakistani ethnicity. So far, so “meh”.

But consider what happens at the second lowest quintile of attainers. This time, only 9.7 per cent of all white British students in this attainment bracket end up at university. At this same level of attainment, the HE progression rate for those of Pakistani ethnicity is 38.4 per cent, while the rate for those of Black African ethnicity is 52.1 per cent.

You can take a look at all the percentages here in Table 4 of my paper if you’re really keen, but I can sum it up for you quite simply. While young people from ethnic minority backgrounds with high school attainment are slightly more likely to go to university than high attainers from white British backgrounds, lower attainers from ethnic minority backgrounds are considerably more likely to end up at university than their lower attaining white British counterparts.

And when I say considerably, I mean considerably.

Implications

The upshot of all this is quite simple. Rightly or wrongly, once you get below a certain level of attainment, young people of white British ethnicity just don’t seem interested in going to university anymore. On the other hand, lower attainers from ethnic minority backgrounds are still quite keen to participate in HE, even though their level of attainment might mean that they may face a somewhat constrained choice of different institutions and courses.

This leads us then to another question – why are young people from ethnic minority backgrounds (especially those with lower attainment) – so much keener to go to university? One somewhat unhelpful answer to this question was offered in the controversial Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report which was commissioned by the previous Conservative government. In the view of the commissioners, many people in ethnic minority communities have “an exaggerated respect for the academic route as the only path to success and economic safety on the part of ethnic minorities”. This perspective of course conveniently ignores another explanation which is well grounded in the sociological literature, which is that within ethnic minority communities, becoming as well-qualified as possible is seen as a necessary strategy to adopt in order to counteract the effects of racial discrimination in the labour market.

Those of white ethnicity, in contrast, may enjoy more latitude to follow alternative pathways with the confidence that they are likely to fall on their feet in the end whatever happens.

Aesop’s fables

One thing we know for sure is that, for those with slightly lower school attainment, white and ethnic minority students seem to be making different choices on average at age 18. How might this all pan out in the longer term? Or, to put it another way, how do graduates with lower school attainment fare in the jobs market, compared to non-graduates with lower school attainment?

When I look at analyses of the LEO earnings data for answers to this question, what I see reminds me of that familiar tale of the race between the tortoise and the hare. School leavers with lower attainment (defined here as not having at least 5 A*-C grades at GCSE) who do not go to university are the hares who dash out of the traps fairly quickly, typically earning wages (albeit fairly low ones) between the ages of 18-21. They have typically enjoyed slightly higher total earnings by age 30 than those lower attainers who went to university, who tend to enjoy only a fairly limited graduate earnings premium at first.

But the graduate tortoises tend to plod their way to greater career earnings in the end, since graduates are much more likely to enjoy wage increases through midlife, whilst the non-graduate hares take an earnings siesta.

Of course, most analysis of LEO so far concerns cohorts of people born in the mid to late 1980s. Without a crystal ball, young people today with lower school attainment can’t really be sure whether going to university (from a career and earnings perspective) will be a smart move or not. Either decision could be justified.

Going to university has always tended to pay off (on average) so far, even as naysayers have continued to argue that the jobs market is becoming too saturated with graduates. On the other hand, continued (and very much welcome) increases in the salaries of less-educated workers (brought about in part by successive real-terms increases to the National Living Wage) may serve to both reduce the size of the graduate earnings premium for lower attainers whilst also increasing the opportunity cost (though foregone earnings) of attending university.

Only the longitudinal studies of the future will confirm whether young people today with lower school attainment will turn out to be better off in the jobs market by going to university or not.

However, if the fortunes of lower attaining graduates turn out to be different on average to the fortunes of lower attaining non-graduates, we can be pretty confident that disparities in fortunes by ethnicity will follow.

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June 17, 2025
It’s the little moments that power social mobility

Anyone who has gone into higher education from a “non-traditional” background knows that widening participation is a double-edged sword. It is there to promote social mobility – but for individual students this journey, once taken, tends to be irreversible.

In return for out-earning your family of origin, you are likely to endure a long period of feeling like an outsider. Whether it’s your accent, the words you use, the house you lived in, what you eat, the school you went to, or where (and indeed, if) you go on holiday, there are thousands of ways that you can feel different – and lesser. For some students, this feeling of being an imposter is further compounded by differences in culture, religion and ethnicity. As time goes on you can either continue standing out like a sore thumb or you can start to assimilate and, in doing so, lose little pieces of yourself forever.

This is the story I heard many times over while carrying out research for a report published today. A Different World explores socioeconomic disadvantage in the transition to university and first year experience. In a partnership between Unite Students, University of Leeds and Manchester Metropolitan University, students took part in interviews, focus groups and co-creation, with most of them contributing directly to the report’s 33 recommendations.

If this many recommendations seems excessive (even though they are helpfully grouped into six themes) it’s because most of them are about small but meaningful actions. I’ve spent the best part of 25 years advocating for a more inclusive higher education sector, but it’s only since working in student accommodation that I’ve come to see the value of these day-to-day moments as a force for change.

University visits for schools are good, tutoring projects even better, and the return of grants would be lovely – but wherever the student experience is built on middle-class norms we will continue to see lower enrolment, continuation, completion, attainment and graduate outcomes among students from a different background.

The change that is needed – and attainable – involves small, local actions in addition to system-level change.

In their own words

A Different World enables students to tell their own stories in their own words, which brings a richness of nuance to the topic and reveals opportunities for change.

For example, there are many ways to cope with alienation, but opportunities to meet others from similar backgrounds really helps. As well as other students, this could also include staff members, and not just academic staff. Student accommodation maintenance teams made a difference for one student, and outside of this research I’ve heard many stories of students whose experience has been transformed by housekeepers or the reception team. Do we recognise and encourage this enough? Students were also reassured by services specifically aimed at them. We British don’t like to talk about social class, but maybe it would be helpful if we did.

Students also shared the challenges of working and balancing a budget, and financial matters certainly did limit opportunities for socialising and extra-curriculars. However, they talked at least as much about their budgeting skills and ability to find the best bargains, skills usually learned from family. They were so impressive in this respect that they would have been helpful peer coaches for students in financial difficulty.

A less obvious impact of socioeconomic background is gaps in fundamental knowledge about higher education. If you are the first person in your family to go to university, and especially if your school or college isn’t geared up to preparing you for it, there will be a lot you don’t know, including “unknown unknowns”, which put you at a disadvantage. For some students, unspoken assumptions tripped them up several times in the first year leading to missed opportunities and academic disadvantage.

A different world

The good news is that there’s a lot that can be done that would benefit students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and much of it would benefit a wider range of students too. You are probably doing some of these already, or in pockets within the organisation.

All academics, and especially personal tutors, could explain expectations, terms and how to interact with them. For example, what are “office hours”, how do students get a meeting with you, and what are they allowed to talk about in those meetings? Module leaders could include ice-breakers at the start of every module, which also helps to promote belonging. Campus services staff could be encouraged and trained to develop more meaningful relationships with students, within appropriate boundaries. You could employ more students, especially those on a low income, and encourage your partners and suppliers to do the same. You could work with student-led societies to develop more inclusive practices and clearer communication. Maybe offer targeted bursaries for extra-curricular activities, via a clear and efficient process. For further inspiration I’d recommend reading the case studies from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Leeds that are included in the report.

Widening access has been a success story over the last three decades – but if we’re serious about delivering social mobility as a sector, and as a society, individual students will benefit from better awareness and support while they are undertaking that difficult journey.

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June 10, 2025
A change agenda for the commuter student experience

In February, we launched our commuter student series, seeking to uncover how universities are responding to the increasing numbers of commuter students – students who continue to live at home whilst studying, rather than relocating to attend university, in contrast to “traditional” residential students.

We sought to increase the visibility of commuters and share best practice, responding to demand for thought leadership and evidence-based interventions, with the aim of influencing pedagogy, practice and policy, within institutions and nationally.

The series also followed the inclusion of commuter students on the Office for Students’ Equality of Opportunity Risk Register in England as a distinct group who experience inequality of opportunity.

In our final article we look back at the series, reflecting on key learnings, before looking forward, setting out a change agenda for commuters that will make higher education more accessible, attractive and available to all.

Commuter students are everywhere yet invisible

Commuter students are part of every UK university.

The proportion of commuters varies by institution – research by Susan Kenyon using 2022 HESA data, shows a range from 12 to 85 per cent.

As such commuters need to be counted and made visible, acknowledged in pedagogy, policy and processes and, where necessary, considered as communities at risk in Access and Participation Plans (APPs) in England.

And despite being everywhere, commuters can often be invisible and underserved.

Earlier in the series Val Yates and Carolyn Oulton discussed how to build an institutional agenda for change by making commuters visible. Their agenda was one where commuters are embedded across the institution. Commuters don’t interact only with their lecturers – supporting commuters lies with academics, across professional services and into teams like IT and sustainability.

We explored the diverse definitions of commuters in APPs, which often makes measuring progress difficult. In supporting commuters, it’s important we know we’re talking about the same group of students. Expanded definitions have considered those who live locally, use transport, have the same term time and home address but also those who relocate but live further away due to cost and housing pressures.

Commuters need to be visible to their institution first before making them visible to each other through access programmes, networks and student societies.

Commuter students are valuable

Our series also reveals the cultural, educational and social value of commuters to our learning community.

Commuters are passionate, engaged and committed. They bring diverse perspectives, experience and expertise to the classroom. As Martin Lowe, Adrian Wright and Mark Wilding write, they “are not just students, they are employees, caregivers, and active members of their communities,” bringing skills such as time management and the ability to balance multiple responsibilities, alongside discipline and an internal motivation to learn that can inspire and influence other students.

And as Emma Maslin highlighted, there is a tendency to see commuters from a deficit perspective, as a disadvantaged group, whose experience needs to be “fixed.”

Our authors don’t deny the academic, financial and social difficulties of being a commuter in a world designed for residential students, particularly when, as Elise Thornton discusses, commuting is often a financial necessity, rather than an active choice.

But the opportunity to attend university as a commuter student can allow students to maintain community, employment and relationships that they value, whilst learning.

Articles by Molly Pemberton and Susan Preston emphasise how valuable commuter students are to the wider student community. Commuters are campaigning for changes in policy, practice and spaces that reshape the university experience and bring benefits to all students.

A common theme running throughout the series is that changes made to pedagogy, policy and processes, which initially aim to create a more inclusive environment for commuter students, benefit all students. And a lot of the time, they’re changes driven by students themselves.

In designing services and learning for commuters, we’ve seen Tom Perou discusses the universal benefits of podcasts, which provide bite-sized learning in an alternative format; Kulvinder Singh described the importance of enhancing belonging in the classroom; and Susan Kenyon and Flic Lindo stressed the importance of improving information on the “rules of the game” and demystifying the “hidden curriculum.”

Commuters are in the city

In the traditional residential model, students remain largely in their defined area. But commuter students are integrated into the wider fabric of communities.

Finding out where commuters are is often a good first step. David Kernohan analysed HESA data to help us understand what constitutes a local student and if local students aren’t going to your provider, where are they going?

It’s common that local authorities don’t know how many students live locally, have relocated or are registered to vote, all of which inhibits the design of services to meet students’ needs. In the context of transport providers, bus fares and transport routes often don’t serve commuters because they don’t first understand that population.

Joel Dowson’s article takes this further, outlining how universities and their students’ unions can leverage the financial value of students to transport providers, in terms of revenue and potential gains from reduced road congestion. At the Greater Manchester Student Partnership they have been lobbying for an improved commuter student experience, influencing the affordability and availability of transport services, to the benefit of all students.

A commuter change agenda

The aim of this series was to empower everyone in HE, whatever their role, to have a better understanding of the needs of commuter students.

And as our contributions have evidenced, work happens everywhere – in professional services, in the classroom, in regional advocacy and with students.

When thinking about where the work starts, it might be at your desk. There’s four categories to our change agenda, drawing on contributions from authors across the series: in the classroom, at the institution, with students and in national policy.

In the classroom

Supporting commuters in the classroom is about making them feel seen and making them visible to each other. Active pedagogies develop belonging and on-commute learning options such as podcasts, pre-recorded lectures or flipped learning are examples of inclusive learning delivery. Creating a reason to attend and articulating the benefits to students is important to sustain engagement.

At the institution

Institutions need to count commuters, then research, listen and review policies to ensure they work for all students. Practical steps include things like student-centric timetabling, consistent and empathetic attendance policies, providing clear information to commuters on application and offering accommodation options so that students can engage beyond the classroom. Institutions have influence with local governments and transport authorities and can be an effective conduit for making the city more commuter student friendly. And institutions can work towards building institutional empathy so colleagues understand that a lack of engagement may not be laziness, it may be a delayed bus or a train fare hike.

With students

Many APP interventions included co-creating solutions with students rather than for them which is undoubtedly the best step forward. It was students who led the way to making a commuter student lounge at Leeds University through the sharing of university rooms, giving them ownership, space and agency. In any project, involving commuters beyond consultation leads to successful interventions and outcomes.

On a national level

Measuring progress is difficult with different and diverse definitions, the sector needs to start with a shared agreement of who this student group is and how to measure them.

The engagement barriers universities face are often tied to the cost of living crisis. Transport fares are expensive, so commuters make tactical, tough decisions about when and how to engage. Responding to consultations and calls for evidence on key transport policy with commuters helps shift transport service design in favour of students. And institutions are key agents in making change on a national level – at Sheffield Hallam SU, it was their VC support that got students in the room with their mayor to discuss bus prices.

Whether it’s student-centric timetables, creating a commuter student lounge or working with the local transport authority, individuals across institutions want to feel empowered to enhance the commuter student experience themselves. So as institutions better understand, count and make visible the commuter student experience, the next step is for the work to start. And small things make a difference, simply talking about commuters in the classroom helps build community. Students experience enough delays on public transport, they don’t want to see the same delays happening with support at their institutions.

Since publication, John Blake, Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students told us:

Commuter students can sometimes get forgotten in the discourse around higher education. Yet they make up a significant proportion of the student body at all institutions, and at some comprise over three quarters of students. That’s why I really welcome Wonkhe’s focus on this issue. This series has helped identify who commuter students are, the enormous amount they add to the institutions where they study, and the work institutions are doing to support commuter students to get the most from their studies. The OfS has included commuter students in our equality of opportunity risk register, and a number of institutions are working with these students to develop creative solutions to some of the challenges they might face to access and succeed in higher education.

Thank you to all the contributors to the series, if you would like to discuss supporting commuters in more detail, please do reach out to Susan Kenyon.

Click here to read the rest of our commuter student series.

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June 8, 2025