Category: UCAS

  • Rethinking metrics, rethinking narratives: why widening access at elite universities requires more than procedural fairness

    Rethinking metrics, rethinking narratives: why widening access at elite universities requires more than procedural fairness

    by Kate Ayres

    For many years, the fair access agenda in UK HE has emphasised more transparent and consistent admissions processes that are underpinned by clearer criteria and targeted support. As a qualified accountant and training in Lean Six Sigma, I’ve always been drawn to efficiency, clarity, and measurable improvement – principles that shaped much of my work in HE. However, as I moved into more senior roles and worked more closely with institutional decision-makers, I started to ask a different kind of question: why do some reforms, even when implemented well, seem to make little real difference?

    That question sits at the centre of my doctoral research. Despite significant reforms the social composition of Durham University’s student body has felt largely unchanged. From within the institution, it was evident that fairer offer-making was not translating into meaningful shifts in the home-student entrant profile. This revealed an uncomfortable truth: so far, no amount of investment or policy reform can, by itself, reshape the social forces that determine who sees a Durham degree as desirable.

    To understand why, we need to stop looking only at what universities do, and start looking at how students behave, and how the wider customer base, or audience, signals who belongs where.

    Why aren’t internal reforms enough?

    The limited shift in Durham’s home-student body prompts a key question: are our current metrics assuming universities can control demand, when in fact they can only affect the choices of applicants already in their pool?

    My research used fourteen years of UCAS admissions data for Durham University to analyse how applicant characteristics, predicted attainment, school type, and socio-economic background intersect with admissions decisions and outcomes. Using multivariate logistic regression and Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis, I examined the impact of Durham’s 2019 move from decentralised to centralised admissions.

    Results

    Since the centralisation of admissions in 2019:

    • Contextual students are now 72% more likely to receive an offer, reflecting a major shift in offer-making behaviour.
    • Contextual applicants to selecting departments remain 40% less likely to get offers than those applying to recruiting ones.
    • No improvement is seen in firm-acceptance rates, suggesting culture or fit still shape applicant choices.
    • Insurance-acceptance has risen 21%, showing Durham is increasingly seen as a backup option for these students.
    • Contextual students are now 2% less likely to enrol after receiving an offer, raising concerns about deeper barriers to entry.

    Trend Analysis

    The findings were initially encouraging with Contextual applicants became more likely to receive an offer after centralisation. However, the increased offer rate had very limited effect on who actually enrolled. Contextual applicants were increasingly likely to accept alternative universities before Durham. Meanwhile, the proportion of entrants from higher parental SES groups increased, and independent-school students (already overrepresented) continued to make up around one-third of Durham’s home undergraduate intake in 2023.

    Who is in control of demand?

    While Durham has a history of taking affirmative action for contextual students, these findings illustrate that the OfS-set POLAR4 ratios will never be achievable for somewhere like Durham because these measures assume that universities themselves control demand. Drawing on Organisational Ecology, I argue that this assumption is flawed.

    To understand why improved offer-making did not shift entrant composition, we need to look beyond institutional behaviour and examine the ecosystem dynamics that shape demand. Just as ecosystems rely on diversity, so does HE. No institution can appeal to every audience, nor should it. Organisations operate within ecosystems shaped by social, economic, and political forces, and crucially by their audiences, who ultimately determine demand. Therefore, it is the audience that defines an organisation’s niche. In HE, applicants gravitate toward universities that align with their social tastes, expectations, and sense of belonging. Therefore, the most powerful forces shaping demand are the social networks and information transmissions within and these influence applicants long before they apply: what they hear at school, family expectations, and what peers believe “people like us” do—and where “people like us” go.

    Currently, wider systemic shifts are reinforcing and entrenching Durham’s niche, especially among white independent-school applicants:

    1.  As Oxbridge intensifies its widening participation initiatives, applicants who traditionally succeed (predominantly white students from independent schools) are increasingly less likely to secure offers.
    2. These applicants seek the closest alternative to the Oxbridge experience, with Durham emerging as a preferred option.
    3. Durham is increasingly accepted as a firm choice because of its perceived “fit” with these applicants’ identity and expectations (as seen in this research).
    4. These applicants typically achieve their predicted grades, making entry more likely.
    5. Their growing presence reinforces existing social narratives about Durham’s student profile.
    6. Consequently, the entrant composition remains socially narrow, and these dynamics may intensify.
    7. The narrative of Durham as a socially exclusive institution persists.
    8. Applicants from non-traditional backgrounds thus perceive a lack of belonging.
    9. As a result, these applicants are less likely to select Durham as their firm choice.

    While these dynamics may prompt questions about whether Durham could or should shift away from its position as an “almost-Oxbridge” institution, the evidence suggests that only limited movement is structurally possible. Organisational Ecology predicts that Durham’s niche will remain relatively stable over time and there are many benefits of sticking with a niche approach. The university may be able to broaden its appeal slightly at the margins, drawing in more students from POLAR4 Q3 and Q4 backgrounds, but POLAR4 Q1 and Q2 students are likely to remain outliers. The real question is therefore not whether Durham can radically transform its appeal, but whether it can create the conditions in which those who do apply feel they can belong and thrive. This is where the OfS should take action because, rather than holding universities accountable for applicant pools (which they do not control), it should focus on the areas where institutional agency is strongest. Improving the lived experience of contextual students, strengthening narrative and cultural inclusion, and raising offer-to-acceptance conversion rates are all within Durham’s sphere of influence. Current patterns, particularly the relatively low acceptance and entry rates among contextual applicants, suggest that cultural barriers remain. Regulators should therefore attend less to the composition of the total entrant pool and more to how effectively institutions support, retain, and attract those who already see themselves as potential members of the community.

    Taken together, the wider systemic effects detailed above reinforce, rather than shift, Durham’s niche. Only a proportion of applicants will ever feel an affinity with the institution, which is entirely natural in a diverse HE ecosystem where students gravitate toward environments that resonate with their identities and expectations.

    These systemic forces lie largely outside Durham’s control, and changing the feedback loop requires more than procedural reform. It demands narrative change within the social networks where ideas of belonging are first formed, and a commitment to ensuring that the lived experiences of contextual students at Durham are positive and affirming. Building stronger partnerships with schools can help shift these early perceptions, while amplifying the stories and experiences of students from diverse backgrounds can offer powerful, alternative points of identification. Applicants make decisions based not just on information, but on a deep, intuitive sense of whether a place feels like it’s for “people like us”. This cannot be achieved through admissions policy, strategy, or marketing alone. Institutions can also look to examples such as the University of Bristol, which has reshaped its entrant pool through doing exactly this. Their efforts have influenced not only who feels able to apply, but who can genuinely imagine themselves thriving within the institution, resulting in a gradual shift in their niche.

    Proposal for new metrics

    If we evaluate universities on metrics that assume they control demand, we will misread both the problem and the solution. In the short term, universities cannot determine who chooses to apply, but they can influence who feels confident enough to accept an offer, which may, as seen with Bristol, create gradual shifts in the entrant pool over time. Universities can and should work to broaden their niches, yet Organisational Ecology reminds us that institutions rarely move far from their point of peak appeal, meaning Durham’s niche is likely to remain relatively stable and only widen at the margins. Expecting rapid transformation would be like assuming a population adapted to the Arctic could swiftly relocate to the Caribbean. That’s not saying it’s not possible, but it is not fast. Any substantial change in who feels an affinity with Durham will likewise unfold slowly, as cultural experiences and social narratives evolve. In the meantime, improving the lived experience of contextual students, and seeing this reflected in rising conversion rates, is the most realistic and meaningful early sign of movement within the niche. This stability also means that proportion-based performance measures will continue to make the University appear as though it is underperforming, even when it is behaving exactly as expected within its ecological position. Durham has added complexities in that it will always occupy a relatively small share of the HE market because the physical constraints of Durham City limit expansion. This adds presents further broadening of the niche simply because they can’t change by admitting more students.

    Therefore, metrics focused solely on broad institutional demand will never fully capture the dynamics of access or institutional “progress”. However, rising conversions – from offer to firm acceptance or offer to entry – among contextual students would signal a growing sense of fit, belonging, or affinity. And even if these students never form a majority, improving conversion is a meaningful and realistic way to measure widening participation progress, because it focuses on what an institution can actually influence, the student experience.

    To take these social forces seriously, and to acknowledge that a healthy HE system depends on a diversity of institutions meeting the diverse needs of students, we need metrics that reflect audience attraction and demand dynamics. Current proportion-based measures, fail to capture these realities. Instead, I propose:

    • Because Russell Group institutions occupy a similar position in the Blau Space (they attract applicants with comparable social, cultural, and educational characteristics), organisational ecology theory suggests they compete in neighbouring overlapping niches. This means that isolated widening participation initiatives at a single institution may simply redistribute socially advantaged applicants across the group rather than increase diversity overall. Coordinated widening participation strategies across the Russell Group would therefore reduce competitive displacement and support genuine, sector-wide broadening of access.
    • Introduce regulatory metrics that reward successful conversion, for example offer-to-firm-acceptance rates for underrepresented groups, rather than focusing solely on offers or entrant proportions. This would bring cultural belonging into WP evaluation by capturing the fact that where these students accept an offer and enter, there is likely be a greater sense of affinity, a place where they feel they can “fit”, belong, and succeed.
    • Measure and report the impact of cross-institution outreach among universities with similar audience profiles, recognising that widening participation is driven by sector-level dynamics rather than isolated institutional efforts.
    • Track behavioural demand patterns (such as firm-choice decisions) across groups of institutions to reveal how social signalling influences applicant preferences.

    The future of access lies in changing what we measure—and what we tell ourselves

    Universities often feel they are held solely accountable for widening access, yet my research demonstrates that applicant perceptions, social networks, and systemic hierarchies play an equally powerful role. The most important conclusion of this research is that access outcomes are co-produced. Universities are not solely responsible for entrant composition; applicants are active agents whose perceptions and choices shape institutional realities. To make meaningful change, we need approaches that reflect this distributed responsibility. To make real progress, we must rethink both the metrics we prioritise and the narratives we reproduce.

    Fair admissions processes matter – but without addressing the social dynamics shaping applicant behaviour, procedural fairness alone will never deliver equitable outcomes. By shifting the sector’s focus to behavioural metrics and narrative change, we can begin to challenge the feedback loops that sustain exclusivity and move toward a system where access is genuinely a collaborative effort.

    Durham University may never appeal to more than a small share of the applicant pool, but perhaps the real measure of success is ensuring that those who do not fit the perceived mould feel confident enough to accept and enter. Ecosystems flourish through diversity, and so does HE; no single institution can – or should – meet every need. Our responsibility is to keep access fair, to reshape the narratives that limit choice, and to support those who want to join us to feel that they truly belong. In focusing on this conversion (from offer to entrant) we move toward a more honest and sustainable understanding of what widening participation success looks like. We cannot control the applicant pool, but we can influence the student experience, the narratives that spread through their networks, and their confidence in imagining themselves belonging here.

    Dr Kate Ayres is a Chartered Management Accountant (CIMA) with a DBA from Durham University, where her research explored market niches and widening participation in UK HE through organisational ecology using quantitative methods. She has worked across finance, academic, and project management roles in UK Higher Education, including positions at Durham University and the University of Oxford. Kate currently serves as an Academic Mentor on the Senior Leaders Apprenticeship at Durham University Business School. Her work brings together analytical insight, organisational experience, and a commitment to improving HE culture. She also co-manages and sings with the Durham University Staff Chamber Choir, which she founded.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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  • UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: access and participation

    UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: access and participation

    While one end of your university is focused entirely on the number of undergraduate students that get a place (and pay a fee) each year, another equally important driver is who these students are and where they come from.

    A part of the initial quid pro quo offered to the sector when we lost the last vestiges of student number control and managed expansion in 2012 was that some of this new capacity would be made available for students from non-traditional backgrounds – and that this would happen from everywhere: from the poshest ancient university to the most practical and locally-focused further education college.

    Though regulators all over the UK do keep an eye on how providers are doing at making this egalitarian dream a reality, in England at least the focus has been more on what providers are doing to widen access (and how they know it is working) and less on the actual numbers or entry rates.

    Deprivation

    UCAS has always provided data on what proportion of main scheme UK applicants from major demographics end up with an offer. Because of some smart choices by UCAS in its data design, I can also offer you an main scheme acceptance rate: the proportion of applications that end up with an accepted offer.

    (UCAS main scheme? That’s the one where an applicant applies to up to five courses before the 30 June deadline. It doesn’t include stuff like direct entry to clearing, or records of prior acceptance – where someone applies directly to the provider.)

    We don’t get as many metrics as we used to (what’s happened to UCAS’ own Multiple Equality Measure, or MEMs, I wonder) – and I’ve chosen to look at indices of multiple deprivation as a common way of thinking about participation from economically disadvantaged small areas. There are four of them (SIMD, WIMD, NIMD, and IMD – one for each home nation) and it makes no sense to see them all on one graph. By default we are seeing England (more data points!) but you can also choose to see Wales, Scotland, or Northern Ireland using the “nations/regions” filter.

    You choose your quintile of interest at the top (default is one, the most deprived 20 per cent), a year (default is 2025), chosen measure (offer rate or acceptance rate) and Age (default is “all”). This changes the display at the top: an ordered plot of providers, with the size of the dot showing the number of accepted students. Mouse over a dot to show annual proportions by quintile for main scheme applications, offers, and accepted applicants.

    [Full screen]

    By default you can see the proportion of applications that end with an accepted applicant – but a low score does not mean a provider is terrible at widening access. Recall there are a lot of variables here, with as much to do with student choice (or portfolio) and performance as what the provider does. For this reason the offer rate (how many applications end with an offer being made) is a more popular measure.

    Entry qualifications

    I feel like I keep saying this, but you can’t really talk about access without talking about what qualifications an applicant is likely to be bringing with them. A level performance is a spectacular proxy for how rich your parents are and how nice your house is – even the choice to take A levels is less common among disadvantaged groups.

    On the first issue we still don’t get data on actual (A level or tariff) points at provider level as structured data. The data exists – it’s on course pages at an individual course level, but supposedly it is far too commercially powerful to publish openly in a structured way at provider level. It feels like a policy from another age, and it doesn’t make anyone look good.

    The best we get is a provider-level look at the types of qualification held by accepted applicants (and those that get offers). I’ve not plotted this to enable comparison, but it is fascinating to find individual providers slowly moving away from recruiting A level students only and into the “other” qualification that suggest mature learners, and (less clearly) local rather than national recruitment.

    [Full screen]

    Unconditional

    Back at the end of the 2010s there was a great deal of policy concern around the idea of unconditional offers. This was eventually refined into the “conditional unconditional offer”, a situation where a “firm” commitment from an applicant was rewarded with a lack of insistence on a particular set of grades or tariff points.

    Though there were often valid reasons given for direct unconditional offers (for example, when admission to an arts course was by portfolio, or where – rarely – a provider set its own entrance exams or used a detailed interview process to inform selection) nobody ever really managed to convincingly defend the conditional unconditional offer in a way that stopped being banned (with the briefest of blips when it was accidentally unbanned for a month or so in the 2022 cycle). It was odd as the best available evidence showed that such offers didn’t have an impact on student outcomes.

    I’ve been starting to hear stories about a growth in other forms of unconditional offers in this last cycle – the pressure to lock in applicants may be prompting usual academic requirements to be suspended or lowered. The available data suggest a very slight growth in “other unconditional offers” that regulators may want to keep an eye on, but only back to roughly 2023 levels from a slight dip last year.

    [Full screen]

    In England, at least, we’ve rather taken our eye off the ball when it comes to participation metrics – they exist, but there’s very little (other than the required existence of an access and participation plan for those who want to charge higher fees) to connect them to regulation. There have been some suggestions from ministers that this may change, and if you are in planning or strategy you may wish to get yourself reacquainted with the state of the art in 2025.

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  • UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: provider recruitment strategies

    UCAS End of Cycle, 2025: provider recruitment strategies

    On the face of it, running a successful recruitment round is fairly straightforward.

    It’s a bit like making a salad. Everything needs to look fresh and appetising, and you don’t want too much of one thing in case people don’t like it.

    I mean, it’s not rocket science.

    The provider level data from UCAS nicely illustrates the other, less straightforward end of the equation. We know surprisingly little about what applicants actually want to do, and where they want to do it.

    Sure, there’s near-certainties – medicine at UCL is unlikely to want for well-qualified applicants any time soon – but some things are rather less expected. Computing and IT focused courses, which have been growing in popularity for years, appear to have hit a wall. Is it the onset of generative AI “vibe coding” hitting employment prospects? Is it a change in the public perception of technology companies?

    We pretty much know it is affordability (and the slow atrophy of the student maintenance system) that prompts applicants from less advantaged socio-economic backgrounds to choose to study locally. But we don’t know why selective providers that have historically recruited nationally have decided en masse to move into this very specialised market, or what changes they have made to their standard teaching (and indeed offer-making) approach to make this work.

    It’s questions like these that make the insights available from this year’s UCAS End of Cycle data so fascinating, and the choice of data that is released so frustrating.

    The Russell Group ate my students!

    There’s been a lot of talk (and a lot of quite informed data driven evidence) to suggest that traditionally selective providers have been accepting students with uncharacteristically low grades in greater numbers than in previous years.

    A couple of unexpected new additional data tables shed a little more light. This last (2025) cycle saw selective (high tariff) providers recruit more students with 15 A level points or below than in any previous year – while medium tariff providers are doing less well in students with between 9 and 11 points than any year outside the pandemic, and low tariff providers had their worst year on record for between 10 and 12 points, and their worst year since the pandemic for between 8 and 6 points.

    [Full screen]

    A level points? Yes, for reasons best known to UCAS this is not the same as tariff points (so only includes A level performance, not vocational qualifications or grade 8 piano). You get 6 points for an A*, down to 1 point for an E – and only your best three A levels count. So 12 points means three Bs or thereabouts.

    The counter story is that this change in behavior hasn’t shifted the overall averages by that much. For high tariff providers the average accepted applicant has 13.9 A level points (down from 14 last year or 14.3 in 2016 – that’s round about AAB. Medium tariff is about BCC (10.4), Lower tariff is near enough CCC (9.4 – up very slightly on the historic average).

    [Full screen]

    Usually I’d suggest that this stasis is down to a regular recalculation of tariff groups – but I know that the last time UCAS allocated providers to groups was back in 2012. We’ve also never been told which providers are in which tariff group – this is a different split to the DfE or OfS variants, unhelpfully. And we don’t get data on A level (or tariff) points by provider, which would offer a much more helpful level of granularity to this point of sector-wide interest.

    A peep at provider strategies

    There’s been a welcome update to the release of the provider level End of Cycle dataset: previously we used to get offermaking only within a rather vestigial dataset known as “equalities” – 2025 adds the offermaking data plus a range of new equalities parameters to the main provider level release.

    For all tariff bands or sector-level data is interesting, the increasing diversity of (and increasing competition within) the sector means that provider-level changes in behavior are by far the most interesting component of this release. The new information means that the chart that you lost your morning to last year is now looking very likely to make you lose your entire day.

    This is a complex but powerful dashboard, which shows the difference between the most recent year (2025) of data and a comparator year you can choose (by default last year but you can choose any year since 2019) across two dimensions (you can choose from applications, offers, and accepted applicants for each). I’ve added filters by domicile (UK, international, or all) and subject group (the familiar top level – CAH1 – list).

    It’s a lot of data on one chart, so I’ve added a group filter, which by default removes some smaller providers from the display – and there’s a highlighter to help you find a provider of interest.

    A dot being further up or further right means that measure has grown between the comparator year and the current year, further down or further left means it has shrunk.

    [Full screen]

    There’s a nearly infinite number of stories to tell from this chart. Here’s some notable ones.

    Firstly Canterbury Christ Church University has accepted substantially fewer applicants in 2025 than in 2024. A dig around in the data suggests that decline is focused on UK domiciled applicants studying business subjects, which suggests to me that this shows the end of one or more franchise or partnership arrangements. I asked Canterbury Christ Church University for a comment – nothing yet but I’ll add it if it comes in – I’d imagine that this is the most visible of a wave of providers calculating that the increasing regulatory risk (with both OfS and DfE taking action) is not worth the hassle of running such provision – I’m tentatively pointing at Buckinghamshire New University and Oxford Brookes University as other similar (but smaller) examples).

    Not all of the Russell Group is following the same recruitment strategy – there are instances (Nottingham, Glasgow, Cardiff) where fewer applicants have been accepted than in 2024. Some Russell Group providers (for example Leeds, York, Southampton, and Cardiff) have seen fewer applications than in previous years – the first three in that list have nevertheless increased acceptances over last year. Because we can now see the number of offers made using the filters at the top, it is apparent that the entire group (excepting Cardiff and Southampton) made more offers than last year.

    League leaders

    If you are playing along with the dashboard you’ll have spotted that University College London accepted nearly 2,500 more applicants than last year (after making a genuinely startling 12,000 more offers) . The majority of this increase (2,290 accepted applicants, 10,650 offers) related to international applicants – with growth in pretty much every subject area contributing to this performance.

    That’s not the largest growth in accepted applicants, however (it’s the second largest). For the league leaders, we look to the University of Wolverhampton – which accepted an impressive 3,625 extra applicants compared to last year. Unlike UCL, these are all UK-domiciled students, and nearly all (2,970) are studying business subjects. To me, this suggests a new partnership – I asked Wolverhampton about this, and am waiting to hear back.

    But who made the most offers in 2025? For international students, it’s UCL and it isn’t even close. But for home students it was the University of Exeter, which made 7,130 more UK domiciled offers this year than last year (a total of 37,515 offers in the 2025 cycle!) across a mix of subject areas. Exeter wasn’t able to get me a comment before publication – I’ll add one if it comes in later.

    And I did promise a look at computing recruitment. It is a decline in both applications and acceptances pretty much across the board – with the exception of an 800 student growth in accepted applicants at Bath Spa University. UCL did recruit 40 more students than last year, but this is against a 1,520 decline in applications. There’s still a bit of growth at the University of Manchester, and the University of York – but note also Escape Studios (a growing independent visual effects specialist that was once known as Pearson College, which delivers degrees validated by the Coventry University).

    School leavers

    I’ve also put together a version of this chart that shows only the recruitment of 18 year olds. The direct path between school or college and university is no longer the dominant one in the UK, and hasn’t been for some time – but in policymaking and political discussions it is still where minds tend to go.

    [Full screen]

    Focusing on UK 18 year olds, we can see that the University of Exeter has grown most spectacularly compared to last year on applications, offers, and acceptances. Large amounts of growth in this part of the market tends to be concentrated in more selective providers, but we can also see credible performances from big civic providers like Nottingham Trent University, Manchester Metropolitan University, and Liverpool John Moores University.

    Conversely we can see smaller but notable declines in applications and acceptances from providers including the University of the West of England, Birmingham City University, and the University of East London. The noticeable pattern is that there is no pattern – recruitment among school leavers can go cold anywhere at any time it would seem. And there are some ways around this – both the University of York (up 1,285) and the University of Leeds (up 3,180) upped school-leaver offer making despite a small decline in applications

    A sense of the sector

    Competition is clearly heating up. For those who have hit on a winning recruitment formula, the challenge becomes a need to ensure that every additional undergraduate gets the high quality experience they have been led to expect. An increase in fee income is almost all going to go to investment in capacity (be that more staff, retaining existing staff, or providing more resources). If your expansion has been into applicant groups you have little experience in teaching, the need to invest rises.

    Conversely, for those who have yet to hit upon the way to attract applications reliably there will already have been internal discussions about what needs to be done or what needs to change. Recruitment can and does figure in portfolio review and course revalidation questions: all of which comes down to whether a provider can afford to do what it would like to continue doing. Losing resources or capacity is a very last resort – once you wave goodbye to a course or department it is very difficult to spin back up.

    There will also be attention paid to sector trends – the kind of stuff I plotted back in December when we got the first phase of the End of Cycle release. Is it something your provider is doing, or a more general societal change, that means recruitment is growing or shrinking on a particular course. These are difficult, painful conversations, and need careful, considered, responses.

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  • What is student financial support for in 2025?

    What is student financial support for in 2025?

    UCAS has published its end of cycle data for 2025.

    Alongside the headline figures on acceptances – a record 577,725, up 2.3 per cent on last year – there’s new data on where students intend to live while studying.

    For the first time, UCAS has released figures on intentions to live at home, and they make for fascinating reading.

    Some 89,510 UK 18-year-olds who secured a place this autumn indicated they intended to live at home – up 7 per cent on 83,705 last year.

    That means 31 per cent of UK 18-year-old accepted applicants planned to stay in the family home, a record high and a slight increase on 30 per cent in 2024. A decade ago, it was 22 per cent.

    The figures differ sharply by nation and – crucially – by deprivation. Scottish 18-year-olds are most likely to live at home (46 per cent of accepted Scottish applicants), while Welsh 18-year-olds are least likely (21 per cent).

    But the deprivation gradient is where the real story lies – 52 per cent of UK 18-year-olds in IMD Quintile 1 indicated they planned to live at home, compared to just 12 per cent in Quintile 5.

    In England, that means the most disadvantaged young people are 3.5 times more likely to stay at home than their most advantaged peers.

    The new scholarships tool

    Alongside the figures, UCAS has launched a new scholarships tool designed to help students find the financial support available to them – a development that, given the data above, feels pretty timely. As UCAS chief executive Jo Saxton puts it:

    Every young person should have the chance to make choices based on ambition, not affordability – which is why UCAS has launched a new scholarships tool to help students find financial support and keep their options open.

    Saxton is careful to note that staying at home can “absolutely be the right choice for some”, such as those with caring or family responsibilities – but for others “it may close doors and limit access to courses or the wider university experience.”

    The growing numbers, she suggests, may be driven by rising costs of living and broader financial considerations.

    One of the persistent criticisms of institutional financial support has been its opacity – the postcode lottery of provision that makes it extraordinarily difficult for prospective students (and their advisers) to understand what’s available where.

    Research by Brightside found widespread confusion among young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds about the differences between bursaries, scholarships, and fee waivers, with one commenting that it was almost like universities were “hiding this information away.”

    A centralised tool that aggregates the information is a substantial step forward.

    What are bursaries supposed to do?

    The UCAS development invites another question – what, precisely, is all this student financial support supposed to achieve? As providers face their own financial squeeze – and as I noted last year, some are cutting planned support with OfS approval – it’s worth examining the policy rationale that’s supposed to underpin institutional bursaries and other forms of financial support in 2025.

    In England, the Office for Students’ topic briefing on financial support sets out the regulatory expectation. Providers must, it says, take an evidence-led approach to developing financial support measures, providing a clear rationale for how financial support investment will help to reduce the gaps in access, success and progression.

    Where providers have committed significant resources to financial support, OfS requires “strong evidence” in access and participation plans of how this will “help to improve outcomes for underrepresented students.”

    The difficulty – and OfS acknowledges this – is that the evidence base has been historically thin. The topic briefing noted that previous sector-level analysis has found little evidence that financial support affects student outcomes.

    OFFA research from 2010 found no evidence that bursaries influenced students’ choice of university – subsequent research in 2014 found no evidence that institutional bursary schemes had an observable effect on continuation rates.

    A review by Nursaw Associates concluded that “financial support is not the most important factor in students’ decisions to apply to higher education” and that students receiving financial support have “comparable non-continuation rates with those who receive no financial support.”

    There is, however, a footnote. That same review found that “a sizeable minority of students feel financial support does impact on their behaviour” – suggesting that bursaries may affect attitudes and relationships with institutions, even if the impact on hard outcomes proves harder to detect at sector level.

    What TASO says

    The Centre for Transforming Access and Student Outcomes (TASO) ought to know, and it distinguishes between pre-entry and post-entry financial support. For support offered after students enter HE, TASO’s assessment is that there’s a high-quality body of evidence that finds financial support can have a positive impact on retention/completion – but with a significant caveat:

    …most of the existing research comes from the USA and more evidence is needed on the impact of financial support in the current UK context.

    The key UK study TASO cites is Murphy and Wyness (2016), which found that increasing financial aid by £1,000 increased the likelihood of obtaining at least an upper second-class degree by 3.7 percentage points.

    That’s meaningful – though hardly transformative.

    TASO’s overall verdict is that there is a reasonable evidence base to support the use of needs-based grants to promote retention/completion, but less strong evidence that this approach can improve attainment/degree classification.

    Crucially, TASO is clear about what remains unknown:

    Currently we do not have enough evidence to make claims about which forms of financial support (bursaries/grants/fee-waivers/scholarships) are most effective.

    It also notes that the sector is lacking causal studies about the impact of financial support offered by HE providers in the UK – and that even UK studies from the 2000s might not be relevant anymore, given that the system of student finance has considerably evolved.

    What providers say they’re doing

    The (fairly) newly approved Access and Participation Plans give us a window into how providers are framing their financial support – and the patterns that emerge are revealing.

    Cost pressures

    Across virtually every plan, financial support is positioned as addressing what OfS terms “EORR Risk 10” – cost pressures that can jeopardise a student’s ability to engage with and complete higher education. The language is consistent to the point of being formulaic – bursaries exist to “alleviate financial concerns,” “reduce the necessity for students to undertake excessive paid work,” and allow students to “focus on their studies.”

    Bournemouth University’s framing is typical – its maintenance bursary aims to:

    …reduce financial anxiety and enable students to focus on their studies.

    This is, in policy terms, a success-stage intervention. The dominant theory of change is that financial support improves continuation and completion by reducing the competing demands on students’ time and attention – not that it drives access in the first place.

    Only a handful of plans make explicit claims about bursaries influencing choice of institution, reflecting the weak evidence base on that question.

    The variation in provision

    The amounts on offer vary enormously. At the top end, Imperial College commits over £12.6 million annually to financial support, with its Imperial Bursary providing up to £5,000 per year for students from households with incomes under £70,000.

    King’s College London forecasts over £10.1 million annually through its King’s Education Grant scheme, offering £2,000 per year for students with household incomes up to £25,000. The Courtauld Institute – small but London-based – offers up to £3,000 annually for students with household incomes of £45,000 or less, plus a competitive scholarship worth £10,000 over three years.

    At the other end, provision is far more modest. Anglia Ruskin’s core bursary offers £300 for households up to £25,000, and £200 for those between £25,001 and £42,875. Leeds Arts University’s Creative Practice Support Bursary provides £400 in Level 4, £500 in Level 5, and £700 in Level 6.

    Aston offers just £500 in first year only for households under £42,875. Birmingham Newman’s Support Fund averages around £429 per grant application.

    The household income thresholds at which support kicks in also vary wildly – £25,000 at many providers, £30,000 at Bradford, £42,875 at others, £45,000 at the Courtauld, £63,000 at Sheffield Hallam, and £70,000 at Imperial. A student from a household earning £50,000 would be entitled to substantial support at some institutions and nothing whatsoever at others.

    Care leavers and estranged students

    If there’s one area of genuine consensus across the plans, it’s the treatment of care-experienced and estranged students. These groups consistently receive the most generous and comprehensive support – reflecting both their acute financial vulnerability and the sustained lobbying by organisations like Stand Alone and Become.

    City University of London offers £3,500 annually through its City Cares Bursary, plus up to £2,500 in hardship funding and a £750 graduation package. Bournemouth provides £3,000 per year plus guaranteed year-round accommodation. Coventry covers 52 weeks of accommodation costs – valued at approximately £8,320 per care leaver annually – recognising that these students have nowhere to go during vacations.

    King’s adds an extra £1,000 annual award on top of its standard bursary. Liverpool Hope offers a 50 per cent accommodation discount plus a catering package. Northumbria’s new Unite Foundation partnership offers free 52-week accommodation for up to six eligible students.

    The rationale is that these students face not just financial disadvantage but the absence of family safety nets. The consistency of provision here – and its relative generosity compared to income-based bursaries – suggests the sector has internalised the argument that care leavers require qualitatively different support.

    Hardship funds

    Beyond core bursaries, hardship funds have expanded substantially across the sector. Northumbria commits £3 million annually – a figure that reflects both genuine need and, perhaps, an acknowledgment that predictable bursary amounts cannot address unpredictable financial crises.

    Kingston forecasts over £2.2 million in total financial support, with its Student Support Fund providing up to £3,000 for students with dependents. Birmingham City maintains a Financial Assistance Fund of £1.375 million annually. Canterbury Christ Church’s Access to Learning Fund can award up to £3,750 for students in extreme hardship.

    The growth of hardship provision raises an interesting question – is this evidence that core bursaries are insufficient, or that student financial precarity has become so acute that even “adequate” maintenance plus bursary doesn’t prevent crisis? Several plans note rising applications to hardship funds as a driver of expanded provision – Falmouth explicitly states it has “substantially increased funding for the Hardship Fund to meet demand.”

    Expansion of in-kind support

    A notable trend is the expansion of non-cash support – laptops, textbooks, food, accommodation subsidies – that address specific barriers rather than providing general maintenance. Birmingham City’s “BCU Advantage” scheme provides students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds with a “laptop for life.” Anglia Ruskin offers one free core electronic textbook per module to all Level 4 students.

    Several providers now run community pantries, food banks, or subsidised meal schemes – Birmingham Newman offers discounted food after 2pm, Canterbury Christ Church has a “Helping Hand menu,” Leeds Trinity provides a “£2 hot meal deal.”

    This shift reflects a recognition that cash bursaries, however welcome, may not address specific resource barriers. A student who can’t afford a laptop faces a qualitatively different problem from one who needs help with general living costs – and a textbook scheme that reaches all students may be more equitable than a bursary that requires application and means-testing. The Open University’s Study-Related Costs Fund, providing grants up to £250 for IT equipment, explicitly addresses the “digital exclusion” risk that’s particularly acute for distance learners.

    Progression-related support

    There’s also growing emphasis on progression-related financial support – interview travel costs, placement expenses, work experience funds, internship bursaries – reflecting recognition that financial barriers don’t end at graduation. Aston offers a £1,250 placement bursary for students from low-income households or those undertaking unpaid placements. City University’s Micro-placement Fund provides up to £500 for participation in micro-placements. Arts University Bournemouth offers up to £300 for costs associated with accessing graduate employment opportunities.

    The rationale is explicitly tied to closing progression gaps. As Bournemouth’s plan notes, “internal data shows that placements are strongly associated with improved degree attainment and progression into high-skilled employment” – but low-income students face financial barriers to participation. Liverpool John Moores is developing new “ring-fenced paid internship programmes” specifically for Black students and care-experienced students, “targeting sectors where progression gaps are largest.”

    Scholarships Plus

    A handful of providers are explicitly integrating financial support with non-financial interventions – what York St John calls “Scholarships Plus.” The idea is that cash alone is insufficient – bursaries should be accompanied by activities designed to enhance confidence, belonging, and career readiness.

    Sheffield Hallam’s Student Success Scholarship is “highly targeted at students with household incomes under £63,000 who belong to defined ‘priority groups’” – but the purpose is explicitly to increase “the student’s capacity to engage fully with their studies,” not just to provide income replacement.

    It’s a more sophisticated theory of change than simple cash transfer – but it also raises questions about conditionality and whether support should require participation in additional activities. The evidence base for “scholarships plus” approaches is, if anything, even thinner than for straightforward bursaries.

    Front-loading versus smoothing

    The plans also show up divergent approaches to how support is structured across the student lifecycle. Some providers front-load support, offering higher amounts in first year when transition challenges are greatest. Aston’s £500 bursary is first-year only; Kingston’s £2,000 bursary is first-year only. The rationale is that this is when financial barriers to continuation are most acute.

    Others have moved in the opposite direction. One provider I looked at last year shifted from higher initial support with reduced amounts in subsequent years to a flat £1,000 across all years – a “smoothing” approach. Leeds Arts University actually back-loads its support: £400 in Level 4, £500 in Level 5, £700 in Level 6 – reflecting the higher material costs of final-year creative projects. Norwich University of the Arts does something similar: up to £500 in Year 0/1, £300 in Year 2, £200 in Year 3.

    The evidence on optimal timing is essentially non-existent. Does front-loading improve continuation? Does back-loading support completion? Does smoothing reduce financial anxiety across the whole course? The plans assert various rationales, but few cite robust evidence for their chosen approach.

    Evaluation, evaluation, and inflation

    OfS requires providers to evaluate their financial support using “robust methods” – and several plans reference the OfS Financial Support Evaluation Toolkit, quasi-experimental designs, or commitments to ongoing evaluation. Birmingham mentions it “will continue periodically” to evaluate its financial support offer “based upon the OfS financial support toolkit.” East Anglia commits to evaluating financial support “using a quasi-experimental design.”

    But the reality is that there’s little evidence of systematic evaluation across the sector – and almost no evidence that planned reductions in financial support have been evaluated for negative impacts. Providers cutting bursaries don’t appear to be required to demonstrate that this won’t harm continuation or completion. The OfS toolkit exists, but its use appears patchy at best.

    Also notable is what’s absent from the plans. Inflation – the factor that has most dramatically affected student living costs over the plan period – is rarely mentioned except in relation to the maximum tuition fee that providers hope to charge.

    Students facing a cost-of-living crisis that has seen food prices rise by over 25 per cent since 2021 are, apparently, not worthy of quantified analysis. Bursary amounts are stated in nominal terms with no commitment to uprating – household income thresholds are fixed with no acknowledgment that £25,000 in 2028 will be worth substantially less than £25,000 today.

    Kingston’s new “Back on Track grant” – up to £500 for students experiencing “short-term financial difficulty due to cost-of-living increases” – is one of the few explicit acknowledgments that inflation has changed the landscape. But this is framed as crisis intervention, not as a reason to revisit core bursary amounts.

    Coherence

    Overall we see a sector that has internalised a consistent rationale for financial support – addressing cost pressures to improve continuation and completion – while implementing it through inconsistent mechanisms. A student from a household earning £25,000 might receive £5,000 at Imperial, £2,000 at King’s, £1,000 at Kingston (first year only), £500 at Aston (first year only), or £300 at Anglia Ruskin. The same student with care experience might receive anywhere from £1,000 to £8,000+ depending on institution, location, and whether accommodation is included.

    This is, of course, partly a function of institutional resources and student demographics – providers with higher proportions of disadvantaged students must spread resources more thinly. Murphy and Wyness (2016) found precisely this – a decentralised bursary system creates inequalities, with disadvantaged students at better-resourced institutions receiving substantially more. As they noted:

    …universities with a higher proportion of disadvantaged students have to spread their resources amongst more students, limiting the amount that each student can get.

    But there’s a deeper coherence problem. The regulatory framework asks providers to demonstrate how financial support will “improve outcomes for underrepresented students” – yet the evidence that institutional bursaries achieve this at scale remains weak.

    Providers are, in effect, being asked to evaluate something that the sector-level evidence suggests may not work in the way the policy assumes. And when providers conclude that their bursary scheme isn’t delivering – or that resources would be better deployed elsewhere – OfS appears willing to approve reductions without requiring evidence that this won’t cause harm.

    Meanwhile, the broader context is getting worse. Maintenance loan increases have failed to match inflation; the parental contribution threshold has been frozen at £25,000 since 2007; and today’s UCAS data shows disadvantaged students increasingly constrained in their choices. The total planned financial support across the sample I examined last year was set to fall from £20 million in 2020-21 to £17 million by 2028-29 – real-terms cuts, approved by OfS, at precisely the moment students need more support.

    The UCAS tool matters

    This is why the UCAS scholarships tool feels significant – not because it solves the underlying problem, but because it at least addresses one of the compounding factors. If bursaries are to have any effect on access (rather than just continuation), prospective students need to know what’s available before they make choices.

    The current system, where information is scattered across hundreds of institutional websites with different eligibility criteria, different application processes, and different timescales, serves no one well.

    A centralised tool won’t fix the postcode lottery of provision. It won’t address the fact that some providers are cutting support while others expand it, and it won’t resolve the fundamental question of whether institutional bursaries are the most effective use of access and participation spend. But it might – might – help more students discover support they’re entitled to, and make slightly more informed choices as a result.

    As Saxton notes:

    …we need to remain alert to these challenges and more research is needed to fully understand the impact on student choice and progression.

    That research gap – what financial support actually achieves, for whom, and under what conditions – remains the elephant in the room. Until it’s addressed, we’re left with a system where providers invest hundreds of millions of pounds annually in financial support, regulators require evidence of impact, but we still don’t really know whether any of it works.

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  • UCAS End of Cycle sector level data, 2025

    UCAS End of Cycle sector level data, 2025

    There’s any number of stories that can be told from UCAS’ sector level end of cycle data release.

    UCAS itself, for instance, focuses on the new data on student residence intentions – 31 per cent of 18 year old applicants in 2025 intend to live at home (rising to 46 per cent in Scotland).

    If we add in information on deprivation (IMD) and acceptance route, we learn that 50 per cent of the less advantaged quintile of students aged 18 intend to live at home while studying, compared to just 18 per cent of their peers in quintile 5.

    And there are interesting regional variations – two thirds of the least advantaged 18 year old accepted applicants in Scotland intend to live at home (mouse over the map to see the regional breakdowns – and of course UK wide IMD isn’t a thing so treat that as indicative only).

    Likewise, 75 per cent of the least advantaged group applying via main scheme Clearing will be living at home.

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    Tariff wars

    But you know and I know there has only been one recruitment story this year, and it is one that is best described via a very familiar chart:

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    Higher tariff (what we once called “selective”) providers are recruiting more 18 year old students than ever before, a trend that has become more prominent since the end of pandemic restrictions. The chart above shows acceptance rates, demonstrating that – simply put – as an 18 year old you are now substantially more likely to end up at a high tariff provider if you apply there.

    One of the commonly proposed explanations for this phenomenon is the way in which applicants are using the “decline my place” functionality (on the UCAS platform since 2019) to trade up to a more prestigious provider. But the data neatly disproves this – movement tends to be within rather than between tariff bands:

    [Full screen]

    So what else might be going on?

    We also get data by tariff group and acceptance route in this release – and from that we can see some very interesting underlying trends. Here the thick bars are the proportions and the thin ones the raw numbers, with the colours showing acceptance routes.

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    Gradually higher tariff providers have been taking a lower proportion of their 18 year old students via firm acceptances, and a higher proportion from other main scheme choices (including clearing). But this shift needs to be set against enormous expansion in numbers across the board – high tariff providers took more 18 year olds overall this year than their entire 2019 intake, and more firm or insurance 18 year old applicants this year than their entire 2023 intake.

    In contrast, proportions of 18 year olds by route have stayed broadly similar by proportion in medium and low providers, with medium tariff numbers staying steady and low tariff numbers slowly falling.

    More data please?

    So, even though high tariff providers have been slightly more active in clearing than in recent years (and even then, it is not outside of historic proportions) the growth comes simply from making offers to more applicants who apply to them, and then accepting them.

    What I really wanted to know is on what terms. There’s already a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that high-tariff providers are making low tariff offers – and I was hoping that this release would give us the data we needed to be sure.

    But UCAS has always been very coy about the association between tariff groups and the actual grades they accept. I can kind of understand the commercial in confidence arguments about detailed data at provider level (but the more I think about it the less I do…) – I cannot see any reason why we are not allowed to see grades by tariff group.

    So I am taking a roundabout route using the data we have got, and we start by looking at the relationship between achieved A level points and POLAR4 quintiles. I’ve generally held the opinion that A levels are a fantastic way of telling how middle class an 18 year old applicant is so there are no surprises that people from better off background are more likely to apply, more likely to be accepted if they apply, and more likely to have better grades than their peers when they do – here’s that in graphical form.

    [Full screen]

    Outside of the years of the examnishambles proportions remain pretty stable, even though numbers have increased in all cases. Roughly a third of POLAR quintile 5 (most advantaged) accepted applicants get AAA or above, roughly three in ten of POLAR quintile 1 (least advantaged) accepted applicants get CCC or below.

    We run into another wrinkle in the UCAS data here: we don’t get tariff group acceptances by POLAR, though we do get it by IMD (and we don’t get A level points by IMD, but we do by POLAR). I’m pretty sure UCAS invented the multiple equality measure (MEMS) for precisely that reason, but we don’t appear to get that at all these days.

    So here is a plot of acceptance applicants by IMD quintile (note that you can only really look at one home nation at a time due to differences in methodologies). And what is apparent is the familiar slow steady growth in less advantaged 18 year accepted applicants attributed to widening access initiatives.

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    Unfortunately this is a case of what we don’t see. There’s a potential happy ending where we learn that high tariff providers are massively expanding their recruitment of applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, and that this explains both the rise in numbers and any decline in average offermaking. The growth in high tariff recruitment from low advantage quintiles is welcome, but not anything like huge enough to explain the growth in numbers.

    We are left to conclude that the expansion is in all groups equally – and given that most of the best A level scores tend to go to the top of the league tables anyway, it is hard to dismiss the idea that tariffs are falling. Perhaps January’s provider level release will offer us more oblique ways to examine what should be a very straightforward question – and one (that given the influx of less academically experienced students into providers that have not historically supported students like that) may well attract regulatory interest.

    Bonus charts

    We randomly got a really lovely dataset showing entry rates by Westminster constituency – and I could hardly resist plotting it alongside the 2024 election results. There is a mild correspondence between a lower entry rate and a higher Reform UK vote.

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  • High tariff providers may be making medium tariff offers

    High tariff providers may be making medium tariff offers

    There’s only really one headline from this year’s UCAS cycle – and that’s about the recruitment behavior of higher-tariff providers.

    The closest analogue is 2021: the so-called “mutant algorithm” year in which higher-than-predicted A level results (arguably the first accurate and fair set of results for many years, unconstrained by any predetermined curve) meant that traditionally selective providers were contractually obligated to honour a lot more offers than expected.

    But there was no such anomaly in results this year. The cohort did do very slightly better than expected (within the limits of the system), but this was – as it should be – down to their own hard work rather than any external factor.

    The assumption has to be that the growth in numbers at selective providers (those that have traditionally used tough level three requirements as a way of admitting only those with the best results) has to be down to a change in behavior. So what has changed, and why?

    What are we looking at

    Twenty-eight days after A level results day (JCQ results day to use the technical term) isn’t quite the final day of Clearing. You can still apply for 2025 entry up until 6pm on 24 September – which, depending on where you are heading, is pretty much welcome week.

    However, JCQ+28 is the last point at which UCAS releases statistics on applications and acceptances, before we get to the End of Cycle reports through December and January. These are the points where we can get a perspective on how this round of recruitment has gone (for the sector in December, by provider in January).

    But even this isn’t a final number. Many universities and colleges have multiple undergraduate entry points – and of course not all applications go via UCAS. End of cycle UCAS statistics do include the ones that they know about (the “Record of Prior Acceptance”) but the Clearing data does not.

    Volume up

    In most recent years around 10 per cent of applicants overall have been placed via Clearing, including both “direct to Clearing” applications (where someone hasn’t made choices of course and provider on their UCAS form) and standard “Clearing” (where someone has not been accepted, or not accepted a place at their firm or assurance choice). This proportion has grown slightly over the last decade – in 2016 it was nearer 9 per cent.

    [Full screen]

    A part of the reason for this is the introduction of the UCAS “decline your place” option, and the continued improvements in the Clearing system via the “Clearing Plus” tool that matches students with courses and providers based on interests and aptitudes. It is now easier for students to make a change to their plans – to decline a firm (and/or) insurance place even though they met the requirements, and to find another place that suits their needs. As you might guess, this has been a boon for high-tariff providers – who now find it much easier to recruit students who have exceeded results day expectations – but the benefits are wider.

    It is good news for the students in question as well – if you have done particularly well it may unlock a course or university that you wanted to go to but didn’t dare waste an application slot or firm acceptance status on. It might mean a more direct route to a career now you know more about professional requirements, a place nearer home (or further away!), a cheaper part of the country to live in (or an easier one to find term-time work in) or the uni where your friends are also heading. A lot can change in the life of an applicant between putting your form in on 15 January and getting your results in mid-August.

    An element of concern

    So the growth in acceptances at high-tariff providers is partially explained – but not entirely.

    [Full screen]

    You don’t have to spend a long time talking to admissions staff to hear that so-called high-tariff providers are now taking students with less stellar A level results in greater numbers. Making it easier to “trade up” (as the frankly unhelpful discourse would have it) is one thing, lowering the tariff is a different matter.

    The popular perception is that high-tariff providers are better. This is true in that they are better at being high-tariff providers.

    If you’ve done a few open days you will have been made aware that universities are not a homogenous lump. Even on a similarly named course, they will teach differently (more lectures, more tutorial, more blended, more hands on, more theoretical or academic), focus more on different parts of the subject, have different facilities (anything from lab kit to student support services), and even timetable differently. These are the differences that should really be driving applicant decision-making – and a high-tariff provider may not be better for a particular student (whatever their results).

    A choice of university governs a lot more of an applicant’s life than just what they’ll end up putting on their CV and who this might or might not impress – although a lot of popular commentary and ministerial statements take a more simplistic view of “undermatching”.

    Under the bonnet

    Because we get stats on a mostly daily basis, we can get a sense of when the application deals are being sealed. I’ve not plotted every day of data because honestly who has time, but here we have results day, the day after, and the Monday of the next week (traditionally the three big Clearing days) plus day 28 which rounds up most of the rest of the action.

    There’s not much Clearing data in the JCQ results day release: that that is in there is mostly from applicants domiciled in Scotland with SQA results (they get their results a week earlier, the lucky things), mature students, and overseas students. So for 18 year old entry on that day in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland you are just seeing the automatic workings of the UCAS system – where applicants got the grades on the offer they get the place.

    [Full screen]

    And there’s our first clue. The number of initial placements at high tariff providers (England, Wales, and NI domiciled applicants, 18 years old) was higher than the total number of placed applicants last year. Or indeed any year on record.

    You don’t get that by being an aspirational destination, or by being active in Clearing. You get that by lowering the offers you make. We’ll see more in the end of cycle data, but in some cases this would be lowering them by quite a lot. Higher tariff providers didn’t take a lot of students in Clearing (we’re talking about 8,000 of this subgroup in 2025, rather than 7,000 last year or 10,000 in 2019), they took a lot of students.

    Why, though?

    It wasn’t a mistake. There was no underestimation of performance, because performance wasn’t meaningfully different than in any other non-pandemic year.

    And it can’t be pure greed. The best data we have on the cost of educating students (audited, regulated, everything) is TRAC and we know from the last release that selective providers (who tend to be in TRAC groups A and B) tend to recover around 85 per cent of the costs of public funded teaching. If you lose £1,430 on each (price group D) student then if you take more of them that just adds to your deficit?

    There’s a suggestion that some universities are using home students to fill spaces that would previously have gone to (higher fee paying) international students. The thinking being that even some income is better than none, and helps to sustain capacity (departments, courses, jobs) that might otherwise be lost. However, there’s not a massive difference in the number of visas issued by the Home Office, which suggests that there will be a similar number of international students this year as last (still down on 2023 and earlier, mind).

    Any capacity backfilling, in other words, would have happened last year. And there’s been a sharp uptick in the proportion of international students heading to big name destinations this cycle: numbers at selective providers are now at a level above the golden age of the mid 2010s.

    [Full screen]

    The extra students, then, are simply extra students over last year. Growth in numbers, pure and simple. Very few universities have the finances to substantially invest in capacity (staff, estates) – so we have to assume that this means larger classes, less individual attention, more competition for resources, and a tighter accommodation market.

    The most able, and best connected, students will flourish. They pretty much always will – you could lock them in a darkened room for three years and they’d still get a good degree and a good job. It’s the rise in traditionally selective providers recruiting a substantially greater volume of students who have excellent potential but who need extra support and more opportunities to build networks and build confidence, that worries me. I hope these providers are ready to rise to what will be a new and substantial challenge.

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  • Behind the scenes at UCAS on level 3 results day

    Behind the scenes at UCAS on level 3 results day

    In Cheltenham they call it “UCAS Christmas” and it’s not hard to see why. Months of preparation, a whole lot of expectation riding on a single day, highs and lows of emotion, and more snacks than you can shake a stick at.

    Level 3 results day at UCAS HQ has the kind of jittery manic energy that comes when a lot of people have been anticipating this day for months, and half of them have been up since 2.00am the night before. By the time I arrive, the marquee moment – the national release of admissions decisions into 700k-plus inboxes at 8.00am – has passed without a hitch and the main business of Clearing, fielding queries from anxious applicants (and their parents), is under way.

    Nerve centre

    At the heart of the building sits Joint Operations Centre, or JOC for short, a room humming with the quiet buzz of people making sure the right things are happening. Courteney Sheppard, UCAS head of operations, explains that today, most UCAS people who have decision-making power on results day convene in this one space so that if anything happens that needs speedy resolution the right person is on hand. Those with deep subject expertise are housed temporarily in the office next door, ready to jump in to address issues as they arise.

    All along one wall there are massive screens – at least twenty and probably more like thirty, all monitoring different data in real time. One screen simply shows the current time (because in the critical two minutes before 8.00am release there are actions that are coordinated to the second); others track web traffic, database capacity, maximum wait times for calls, social media traffic, applicant behaviours, and much more besides. Opposite the screens is a flipchart where there are already a ream of jotted notes about ways to improve for next year.

    It’s easy to underestimate the logistical and technological challenge facing UCAS on results day but consider how rare it is for any system to have to cope with close to simultaneous login of every possible user. All over the country at 8.00am on the dot applicants’ UCAS results portal goes live and they can login to see whether they have secured their preferred course and higher education institution. Simultaneously they receive an email from UCAS with the same information. And, I’m told, UCAS creates a static web page for each and every applicant with the same information so that if there is any delay at all in getting into the portal, even of only a few seconds, the applicant can be redirected to the information they are looking for.

    “The 8 o’clock moment is always hairy,” says Lynsey Hopkins, UCAS director of admissions. “The preparation is incredible, and takes months, because there are so many moving parts. The tech is really complex and is getting more so all the time. You always worry that if any applicant wasn’t able to see their outcomes that could ramp up their anxiety on one of the highest stakes and most stressful experiences of their young lives.”

    But getting information on admissions decisions out to applicants is only the beginning. The vast majority – in fact the highest number on record this year – will have a place confirmed at their first choice of institution. Most of those will segue seamlessly into celebrating and looking forward to taking up their place. But a substantial number will pass through Clearing – and not only because they have been unlucky enough not to receive an offer from their preferred institution. Some applicants’ plans will have changed since they made their application through UCAS and will wish to decline their place in favour of a different option; others don’t even start applying until the Clearing period. Where UCAS holds data on applicants’ previous choices and qualifications the system will suggest possible matches for applicants to help them begin to sift their options.

    “The largest group of people in Clearing are those who have actively put themselves there,” says Ben Jordan, UCAS head of strategy. “Clearing doesn’t have negative connotations among young people at all – it’s just a brand.”This year 92 per cent of all higher education providers are offering courses through Clearing, and there are more than 30,000 courses available, offering an enormous degree of choice to applicants.

    Holding hands

    In theory, applicants contact institutions directly, and once they have secured an offer, are able to update their applications via their UCAS portal and have the application confirmed by the institution, without active intervention from UCAS. In practice, many applicants still need help and support from the central admissions service.

    Over in the “west wing” there’s the traditional call centre staffed by a mixture of UCAS’ customer service team, volunteers from across the business, and temporary staff, all sporting UCAS t-shirts, headsets and query cards they can wave to summon a senior staff member to help them answer the more complicated questions. On a normal day, UCAS has 50-60 people working on customer services; today it’s around 200.

    It’s not uncommon for calls to simply consist of an applicant saying, “My UCAS portal says I got in. Did I get in?” To which the correct answer is, “Yes, you got in, hurray!” Job done to everyone’s satisfaction. But it’s much more likely that applicants have more complicated questions – predictably many lose their login information, don’t fully understand the process, and generally need a bit of hand-holding at a stressful time.

    “We don’t just handle questions, we handle emotions,” says Jordan Court, customer call handler. “There can be so much riding on this day for applicants, they can get so anxious, it’s understandable they can sometimes lose the ability to deal with administrative stuff.” Every call handler, especially those volunteering receive detailed training, with a strong focus on emotional intelligence. “We tell people, ‘Imagine how you would want your child or your sibling to be treated’” says Courteney. “Nine of ten times what people want from the call is reassurance or validation, especially if they’re not able to get support from a school or college.”

    While the calls come in steadily, in this day and age much of the queries are via social media or the UCAS chatbot, Cassy, which is able to resolve the more transactional questions, reducing the overall call load by around 30 per cent. Some issues require intervention: Jordan is able to resolve one query by noticing from a screenshot that an applicant is trying to access his UCAS portal via a web browser that has been designed for gamers – advising the applicant to try again with a more mainstream browser.

    Without fail, everyone I speak to talks in glowing terms about their experience of being “on the phones” for Clearing. It’s clearly a formative experience for many UCAS staff, giving them a strong sense of purpose and of the importance of the work they do to connect applicants to higher education, as well as occasionally throwing up useful insight about how to improve the applicant experience.

    Lines to take

    Elsewhere in the building Jo Saxton, UCAS chief executive, is fielding media appearances and questions alongside minister for skills Jacqui Smith, who has the day before recorded a special message of congratulations to applicants from UCAS’ very own professional recording studio.

    UCAS director of data and analysis Maggie Smart talks me through the extraordinary process of data analysis that underpins the talking points everyone is reading in the morning papers. As a voluntary signatory to the UK Statistics Authority’s code of practice for statistics, Maggie is responsible for making sure that anything UCAS says about what the data indicates should be verifiable with actual data published on its website.

    Results day for the UCAS data team starts at 11.00pm the night before, capturing live operational data at 12.01am, wrestling it into a format that is publishable as public data, creating different datasets to inform governments in each of the UK Nations, and analysing the key insights that will inform the press release and briefing to the senior team until 5.00am. The press release covering the agreed talking points is signed off and released at 7.00am.

    Following results day the team will track and publish daily Clearing data, updating the public dashboards by 11.00am each day. One innovation for this year will be publication of weekly data on use of the “decline my place” function, seeking to understand more about which applicants are more likely to take up that option.

    In recent years the media around results day has presented something of a mixed picture, with celebratory stories of achievement and advice on securing a university place mixed with more critical queries of the value of higher education. For UCAS, engagement with stakeholders in government and in media is partly about giving confidence in the robustness of the system and partly about landing messages about the continued importance of higher education opportunity, in line with the emphasis on breaking down barriers to participation in UCAS’ recently published strategy.

    In its next strategic period, UCAS will focus on the 250k-odd individuals who register for UCAS but never get to the point of making an application. Understanding the experiences, hopes and aspirations of that cohort will help to inform not just UCAS, but the whole HE sector on how to meet the needs of those of that cohort that could potentially benefit from higher education.

    Given the complexity of the policy landscape for HE it’s invigorating to spend a day with people who share a core belief in the power of higher education to change lives, of which Ben Jordan is possibly one of the most heartfelt. As the policy narrative on access to university takes on a more regional and skills-led flavour, Ben argues that the enormous diversity of the higher education offer needs to be better understood so that students can truly appreciate the breadth of the options they have.

    “I’ve seen purpose-built factories, I’ve seen racing car courses on university campuses,” he says. “These days the majority of applicants aren’t those with just A levels, it’s a much more mixed picture, and it’s so important that they understand not only what is opened up or closed off by the choices they make but how much higher education has to offer them. It’s our job to get that message out.”

    This article is published in association with UCAS.

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  • Number of Chinese undergrads accepted to UK unis surges by 13%

    Number of Chinese undergrads accepted to UK unis surges by 13%

    According to UCAS data released today to coincide with A-level results day, the number of international students accepted to UK institutions has risen to 52,640 – up 2.9% on 2024 when this figure stood at 51,170.

    In just a year, the number of students from China accepted into university via the UCAS system went up a whopping 13% – with a total of 12,380 acceptances.

    Meanwhile, 2025 has proven to be a year of success for domestic students in the UK – with 28.3% of all grades being A or A* for students across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, according to the BBC.

    Commenting on the numbers, UCAS chief executive Jo Saxton pointed out the huge achievement of this year’s students, whose education was hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic.

    “This year’s students were just thirteen when the pandemic hit, and their secondary schooling was turned upside down,” she said. “It’s great to see these applicants securing a university place in record numbers, seeking more education and investing in their futures. I am equally delighted to see how universities across the country have responded to their ambition.”

    Undergraduate international students have also found success this year despite some universities prioritising domestic students due to a focus on financial stability.

    According to a recent BBC article, Saxton explained that some UK universities were focussing on enrolling domestic undergraduates because of “uncertainty” around international students.

    She also pointed out that some institutions could accept a greater number of domestic students this year even if they did not meet the exact conditions of their offer because offering places to UK students, as opposed to international students, was more likely to result in financial stability for the institution.

    It’s great to see these applicants securing a university place in record numbers, seeking more education and investing in their futures
    Jo Saxton, UCAS

    It comes amid a turbulent time for the international education sector in the UK – with upcoming compliance changes forcing some universities to stop recruiting for certain courses or from some countries rather than risk falling foul of tightened BCA metrics.

    Many UK universities are currently facing financial difficulties, with around four in 10 universities currently at a deficit, according to a report by the Office for Students.

    Of the courses chosen by students, the most popular in the UK this year were Engineering and Technology, up 12.5% from last year at 30,020 acceptances, Mathematics with 9,220 acceptances and Law with 27,150.

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  • A levels and acceptances, 2025

    A levels and acceptances, 2025

    This article covers broad trends in results and university place acceptances. It’s not something you need to read if you are, or are supporting, someone on results day or with applying to university. This might be helpful though. 

    Though it is a perilous time to be a university one thing that is holding up seems to be undergraduate applications.

    It is a bumper year – good news for students, who are more likely to be starting on the course and at the provider they really want to be at this autumn, and good news for the sector, who may have started believing the narrative that university is declining in popularity.

    But we do need to separate things out – performance, both by students in achieving qualifications, by providers in running increasingly efficient and attractive recruitment operations, does mask some underlying issues. We’ve somehow reached a situation where study is becoming less affordable for students (especially relating to living costs, and especially affecting students from less advantaged backgrounds) and for universities (with the real value of fees far below 2012 levels, and changes in the market seeing growth among traditionally selective providers).

    Today’s results are spectacular news for the higher education sector, but it surely must be clear to everyone that we are beginning to run out of road.

    UCAS acceptances

    A record number of 18 year old applicants has yielded a record number and proportion (excepting 2021) taking up their firm offers in 2025. Just under 250,000 applicants (representing 63.51 per cent of all 18 year olds applying via UCAS) have started JCQ results day knowing that the university and course they had set their heart on will be where they will study next year.

    Couple this with a recovery in insurance places being taken up, and we have a historically low proportion of 18 year olds entering clearing. Just 15.15 per cent of applicants are currently in clearing, plus another 12.8 per cent still holding offers but yet to confirm.

    The picture is slightly different if you look at all ages – mature applicants are more likely to be in clearing than their younger counterparts – although a non-pandemic record proportion (57.25 per cent) of all students are taking up firm offers.

    That said, it is going to be a hugely competitive few days for admissions teams, but correspondingly good news for applicants looking for a place: there will be more courses looking for students.

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    The sector will have an eye on the distribution of students across types of provider, and will see another entry in a time series that shows the growth of high tariff providers. A record 39 per cent of students who have accepted places on JCQ results day have done so at a high tariff provider – just 29.3 per cent will be starting at a low tariff provider (a record low). What’s “high tariff” these days? Anything above about 125.8 tariff points, according to DfE.

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    The entry rate for the most disadvantaged quintile of 18 year olds in England was 22.9 per cent – the highest proportion on record, but still a long way off the 44.5 per cent of the most advantaged quintile that will start university this autumn. Expect clearing activity to shift this slightly.

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    We also have data on subject area choices (at the top level of the common academic hierarchy). Of those students who have already accepted a place, business and medicine-related courses continue to grow in attractiveness – there’s been an increase in social sciences, engineering, and law (continuing a post-pandemic trend) and a sharp drop in interest for computing courses.

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    It is worth remembering that this represents just the first flush of acceptances – a historically large number of students, but far from the totality of this cohort. Most of the action in clearing happens early, and we’ll be covering that on Wonkhe over the next few days.

    International acceptances

    Not all international recruitment flows through UCAS or conforms to what is (for most of the world) artificial deadlines like JCQ, so this is by necessity an incomplete picture. But, again in contrast to prevailing narratives, numbers are up – there were 52,640 acceptances (up 2.9 per cent on last year) in 2025. We see strong year on year growth in China (up 14.6 per cent), the US (up 10.38 per cent), and Turkey (up 21.71 per cent). India is declining (down 9.42 per cent) and Nigeria is starting to recover (up 20.83 per cent) but still a long way off the peaks of 2022 and 2023.

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    A level results

    A level performance (for students in England, Northern Ireland, and Wales) generally tends to see movements below the margin of error, as the methodology underpinning the award of marks contains elements of norm-referenced methodologies). The pandemic years (2020, 2021, 2022) are the exceptions here due to changes in the grading process.

    [Full screen] proportions

    That said, there are some interesting underlying trends. Overall performance in 2025 is up (nearly 78 per cent got C and above this year, compared to 76.3 per cent last year) – this is based on a smaller (entries were down 0.5 per cent) and academically stronger (the popularity of vocational routes is growing, this was the first cohort to have non-compensated GCSE grades) group of students.

    And, as always, there is huge variation by subject. Law remains the most difficult A level to achieve C and above in – just 64.6 per cent managed this in 2025, compared to 88.4 per cent in art and design disciplines. And law has got harder over time – in 2018 the proportion was 72.7 per cent.

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    Law still remains moderately popular (there were just under 15,000 entries in 2025, up 1 per cent on last year) but is a long way behind the “big four”: maths (112,000, 4.4 per cent), psychology (76,000, down 3.3 per cent), biology (71,000, down 4 per cent), and chemistry (63,500, up 1.5 per cent).

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    What of the more than 250,000 level 3 vocational and technical qualifications awarded by JCQ today? The majority of these are what JCQ call “applied generals” (BTECs and the like) – there were 220,553 awarded, compared to 12,000 T levels.

    Business and social policy qualifications are the dominant subject groups here (both had around 44,000 entries each). For the (most popular) medium sized qualifications – worth one-and-a-half A levels – 80 per cent achieved a Merit or above, and (for those graded A* to E) 75 per cent achieved a C above.

    This is the fourth year of T levels, the new style of vocational and technical level 3 qualification invented by the last government and available in England only – there are now 18 subject routes available. Of the 12,000 or so taking T levels, some 65 per cent achieved a Merit or above, 91 per cent achieved a Pass or above. The numbers are small but growing rapidly, making year on year comparisons tricky – DfE has published some data on these results that goes into a little more depth.

    The Ofqual release shows, once again, that independent and selective school settings have seen the highest proportions of top A level grades, with further education colleges seeing the lowest proportions. As usual, there is no data (or seemingly, interest) in performance at special schools – and neither the main release nor the analytics dashboard feel like special needs status is worth reporting on.

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  • UCAS applications and offer making by June deadline, 2025

    UCAS applications and offer making by June deadline, 2025

    The UCAS 30 June application deadline is the last point an applicant can apply outside of clearing.

    Though most applications (particularly from UK 18 year olds) happen by the January deadline, the June figures allow for a complete analysis of application behaviour in the UCAS main scheme.

    The number of 18 year old UK applicants has reached a record high of 328,390 (up 2.2 per cent on last year) – with the total number of applicants at 665,070 (up 1.3 per cent on last year).

    Application rates

    As always it is salutary to compare the often-pushed narrative that young people are being tempted away from expensive/poor-value/woke (delete as per your personal preference) higher education with the actuality that numbers are rising. You could even be tempted to imagine what the application rates might be like in a sector with a realistic student maintenance offer.

    I mention application rates because this is what declinist commentators will seize on. For UK domiciled 18 year old applicants, the application rate is 41.20 – down from 41.80 per cent last year. This fall is visible across most measures of deprivation: in England, for example, every IMD quintile but quintile 5 (the least disadvantaged) sees a falling application rate.

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    In part, this could be a function of another year where the dominance of higher tariff providers in driving applications has increased: higher tariff providers disproportionately inspire applications from (and recruit) better off young people.

    This chart shows the number of applications to each of three tariff groups. For UK 18 year olds the default is fast becoming an application to a high tariff provider. We don’t (unfortunately) get application numbers by deprivation and tariff group.

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    These number of placed students is likely to rise too: UCAS and Ofqual have suggested that there are 28,000 places available in Clearing this year.

    Offer rates

    One innovation in this year’s release is information on offer rates – the proportion of applications that result in an offer being made. We get three years of data, which demonstrate that offer rates are rising across the sector – and that (as you may expect) high tariff providers are less likely to make offers than lower tariff providers. The growth among high tariff providers is driven both by rising application numbers and a rising offer rate.

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    For believers of the other recruitment myth (that universities load up on international students and are less keen to take even very able home students) we get a timely corrective. It turns out that 98.5 per cent of UK 18 year old applicants have an offer, compared with 89.7 per cent of international students.

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    Subjects

    Finally, it’s always fascinating to look at applications by subject area – a plot by CAH1 groups shows a sharp rise in the popularity of business, subjects allied to medicine, engineering, and law: with an intriguing drop in applications to computing subjects. There may be a generative AI effect on computing applications – the rise of “vibe coding” and other uses of agents in software development may mean that the attraction of learning to programme computers properly may be waning.

    That’s the best explanation I have – and it is curious that law (a domain where predictions of AI tools eating entry level roles are ten a penny) doesn’t appear to be experiencing a similar phenomenon.

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