Tag: flexibility

Accreditors offer flexibility on DEI standards

President Donald Trump’s broadside against diversity, equity and inclusion has left colleges scrambling to determine how to comply—even as they juggle accreditation standards containing elements of DEI.

But even with an executive order from the Trump administration targeting “illegal” DEI programs at colleges blocked by the courts, and a Dear Colleague letter from the Education Department likely unenforceable, accreditors are treading lightly on DEI, allowing colleges leeway on complying to certain standards. If the accreditors didn’t provide such flexibility, colleges would essentially have to decide between complying with the federal government or with their accreditor—a nearly impossible situation for institutions.

Some, like the STEM accreditor ABET, have dropped DEI standards entirely. And the American Bar Association suspended enforcement of its DEI standards through August while it weighs revisions to such requirements.

As colleges feel the squeeze, some of the largest institutional accreditors have decided not to force colleges to choose between them or the Education Department, at least for now, largely telling institutions they will not be adversely affected if they fail to comply with DEI standards due to state or federal laws.

Accreditors Push Back

While accreditors allow colleges to operate with flexibility on DEI standards, some are also pushing back on the Trump administration’s crackdown, particularly the Dear Colleague letter that seeks to expand a Supreme Court opinion in the Students for Fair Admissions case, which shot down affirmative action, to ban race-conscious scholarships, programming and more.

“We would suggest that the [U.S. Department of Education’s] interpretation of SFFA is overly broad and expansive, a concern shared among legal experts,” the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions wrote in a letter to the Trump administration Monday.

C-RAC officials added that the 14-day deadline for colleges to drop all race-conscious activities is “unreasonable” and that “the expectations for institutional actions or the methods through which institutions are expected to comply with these broad reaching requirements are unclear.”

Numerous accreditors also signed on to a letter to the department from the American Council on Education, which raised similar concerns. That letter also noted that, “however one defines DEI—and DEI is a concept that means different things to different parties—it is worth noting that the range of activities that are commonly associated with DEI are not, in and of themselves, illegal.”

Offering Flexibility

As accreditors press the Department of Education for clarity, they have also provided guidance to colleges, emphasizing that their member institutions must follow state and federal laws.

“What we have said is that they can be assured we would not take any adverse action with regard to any of our standards if the institution is attempting to follow what they believe is a legal requirement,” Larry Schall, president of the New England Commission of Higher Education, told Inside Higher Ed.

Nicole Biever, chief of staff at the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, wrote by email that the organization has notified institutions “that the Commission would never expect any institution to violate the laws or government mandates of the jurisdictions in which they operate.”

She added that MSCHE standards “will in no way inhibit” institutional compliance with the law.

Barbara Gellman-Danley, president of the Higher Learning Commission, emphasized in an email to Inside Higher Ed that institutions must comply with all members of the regulatory triad, comprised of accreditors, state governments and the federal Department of Education. If “HLC’s requirements overlap with requirements from other members of the Triad, we work with the other Triad members to identify these situations and limit the burden on the institution,” she wrote.

“HLC does not prescribe how a member institution meets HLC’s requirements,” she added. “If a requirement of another entity of the Triad may appear to limit an institution’s ability to meet HLC’s requirements in a particular manner, an institution has the flexibility within HLC’s requirements to identify other ways to demonstrate it meets HLC’s requirements.”

In guidance sent to member institutions, Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission interim president Christopher Oberg noted that the Dear Colleague letter does not have the force of the law and encouraged institutions “to consult their own legal counsel to help navigate the Department’s guidance.” Oberg added that the organization “will continue to provide updates to member institutions as matters are clarified.”

The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges has also emphasized flexibility in its guidance to members.

“It is important to note that as a federally recognized institutional accreditor, ACCJC would never require a member institution to violate state or federal laws and regulations or consumer protection clauses. As an agency, we are beholden to the federal government, state governments, and our member institutions, and work collaboratively and flexibly with those oversight partners to meet any and all regulations and communicate requirements to member institutions, as necessary,” AACJC president Mac Powell wrote by email.

What Are the DEI Standards?

Policies on DEI are as varied as the accreditors themselves, with different requirements or none at all.

For instance, NECHE’s accreditation criteria urge member institutions to address their “own goals for the achievement of diversity, equity, and inclusion” across the student body, faculty and staff.

But MSCHE’s accreditation criteria require institutions to “reflect deeply and share results on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the context of their mission” across areas such as goals and actions, demographics, policies, processes, assessments, and resource allocation.

“One goal of DEI reflection would be to address disparate impacts on an increasingly diverse student population if discovered,” part of MSCHE’s standards reads. Elsewhere, MSCHE indicates that candidates for accreditation should have “sufficient diversity, independence, and expertise to ensure the integrity of the institution.”

Other accreditors, such as HLC, say that an accredited college should strive “to ensure that the overall composition of its faculty and staff reflects human diversity as appropriate within its mission and for the constituencies it serves.”

Others, such as programmatic accreditors, may have more exacting standards. But some accreditors, like the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, have never included DEI criteria.

Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities interim president Jeff Fox told Inside Higher Ed by email that it too has never officially had DEI standards as part of its accreditation requirements.

“The NWCCU has no language in the standards pertaining to DEI, and it recognizes institutions are addressing the requirements of various state and federal laws in this arena. The NWCCU supports institutions in their efforts to address the DCL as appropriate for their circumstances,” Fox wrote.

‘Very Little Danger’

Some critics, particularly on the conservative side, take a dim view of accreditors’ DEI standards. Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the conservative Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, wrote in a recent paper that “accreditors too often abuse their power as gatekeepers” to federal financial aid, including in areas such as pushing DEI standards.

On paper, such standards look fine, he wrote to Inside Higher Ed by email. But he questions how such standards get enforced, arguing that “the problem is the interpretation of those standards. Accreditors can and do use vague standards to force radical changes on campus.”

Gillen pointed to a past conflict in 2000 when—he argued—the ABA “used innocuous and vague diversity requirements to force George Mason University Law School to discriminate in favor of Black applicants by simply rejecting anything the university did short of discriminating.”

But Gillen believes colleges face little risk if they fail to comply with accreditors’ DEI standards.

“Colleges are in very little danger so long as they follow federal civil rights laws, which have largely reverted to their original intention of promoting colorblindness,” he wrote. “Any state or accreditor that requires violating these laws will find itself in a world of legal trouble. Accreditors that ignore civil rights laws would lose their recognition from the Department of Education, and colleges that followed such requirements would also lose access to federal aid programs.”

Robert Shireman, a senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation and a member of the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which advises the education secretary on accreditation, downplays the notion that accreditors’ DEI standards are burdensome.

Typically, he told Inside Higher Ed, accreditors’ DEI requirements are minimal. Such standards tend to focus on inclusivity, but he notes that accreditors are “not enforcing any kind of quota.”

At a recent NACIQI meeting, he said when asked about changing DEI standards, accreditors indicated they didn’t plan to do so because “they feel that there’s nothing inappropriate about the approaches that they are taking, and they are holding firm.” He added that accreditors recognize “schools have to comply with laws, whether those laws are federal laws or state laws.”

There’s also an outstanding question on how the Trump administration is defining DEI.

“‘DEI’ has become this undefined term that gets interpreted in certain kinds of ways,” Shireman said. “And most accreditors are quite flexible in their approach to diversity, equity and inclusion.”

In a time of uncertainty, Shireman believes many institutions want to see accreditors hold firm on DEI while they push ED for guidance on terminating race-conscious activities and programming.

Shireman points to “surprise and outrage” over what he calls “an absurd perversion of civil rights laws that is happening in this administration. To read civil rights laws as prohibiting a caring approach to providing opportunity is Orwellian and it’s not appropriate. I don’t think schools support the idea of accreditors caving in to a backwards interpretation of civil rights laws.”

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February 28, 2025
Research flexibility doesn’t have to mean researcher precarity
If we think about research as a means of driving innovation and by extension economic growth, there is a need to consider the lives of the people who are doing the research.

The UK has a significant strength in the quality and diversity of its higher education system – which trains a large proportion of the staff who end up working in universities (and elsewhere) performing research. We should, in other words, be better than we are at sustaining and shaping research capacity through supporting the people who contribute research throughout their careers.

Certainly, that’s the case that the University and College Union makes in last week’s research staff manifesto – noting that nearly two thirds of research staff are on fixed term contracts, following research funding and strategic decisions around the country at a significant detriment to their personal lives and professional development.

How does the system work?

Precarity is not an accident of the system – it is the entire design of the system. Becoming a postdoc is not the final stage of the undergraduate to postgraduate to researcher pipeline: it is a step into a new system where the trial of job-hopping, house moving, city shifting work, may one day lead to a full time post.

The first step after undertaking a doctorate is, unsurprisingly post-doctoral work – the postdoc. The term is confusing as it implies simply the job someone does after being awarded a PhD. Over time the taxonomy has changed to take on a specific meaning. It has become synonymous with precarious employment tied to grant funding. As an example, Imperial College London describes their postdocs as follows
- a member of staff who will have a PhD, and be employed to undertake research
- commonly on an externally funded grant secured by their principal investigator (PI) e.g. Research Council standard grant
- responsible for their own career development but entitled to the support of their PI and the PFDC
- entitled to 10 days development per year
- entitled to 25 days leave plus bank holidays and college closure dates (if full time, pro-rata for part time)
- entitled to regular one-to-one meetings with their line manager
- entitled to a mid and final probation review
- entitled to a Personal Review and Development Plan (PRDP) meeting once per year
Crucially, in the section which describes what a postdoc is not, it includes being “a permanent member of academic staff.”

This is often the case because postdocs are tied to grant funding and grant funding is limited to a certain period of time to cover a specific project. UKRI, for example, does not fund postdocs directly but funds research organisations directly through a mix of focused studentships and capacity funding. Research organisations then fund postdocs.

This means that the flexible deployment of resources is the very start of the system. It’s not an accident or a quirk, it is that the UK’s research system is built around incentivising human capital to move to the organisations and places that most closely aligns to their research skills. The upside of this is that, in theory, it should mean resources are efficiently deployed to the people and places that can use them most productively. In reality, it means that instability and structural barriers to progressing to full research contracts are the norm.

It’s not that UKRI are not aware of this problem. In a 2023 blog on team research Nik Ogryzko, Talent Programme Manager at UKRI, wrote that

We’ve built a system where research groups sometimes act as their own small business inside an institution. And this leads to a very particular set of weaknesses.

Employment contracts have become linked to individual research grants, with research staff often highly dependent on their principal investigator for career progression, or even their continued employment.

Group leaders are often not equipped to support their staff into anything other than an academic career, and we know most research staff do not end up there.

We also know such precarious employment and power imbalances can in some cases lead to bullying, harassment and discrimination. Such structural factors further compromise the integrity of our research, despite the strong intrinsic motivation of our researchers and innovators.“

A number of institutions are signatories to The Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers. When it comes to the use of fixed-term contracts the concordat states that

[…]some of the areas of most concern to researchers, such as the prevalence of fixed-term contracts and enforced mobility, will require long term systemic changes, which can only be realised through collective action across stakeholders.

Again, should a researcher be lucky enough to pass through their postdoc a permanent role is not guaranteed or even the norm. In reading through the websites of universities the reasons for fixed term contracts are various including; to align with grant-funding, to cover peak demand, to meet uncertain demand, to cover staff absence, to cover time-limited projects, secondments, training, and to bring in specialist skills.

It is not that universities don’t recognise the issue of fixed term contracts, institutions like the University of Exeter has a whole framework on the appropriate use of these contacts, it’s that in a funding system which places a premium on project working it is necessary to have a highly flexible staff force.

However, this does not mean that this system is inevitable or that the number of fixed term contracts is desirable.

What is going on?

According to HESA data, that number is slowly falling – both numerically and proportionally – for research only academic staff. As of the 2023-24 academic year, 63.9 per cent of “research only” academic staff (64,265) are on a fixed term contract. This sounds like a lot, but it is down slightly from a peak of 68 per cent (70,050) in 2019-20.

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The proportion of fixed term contracts for teaching only academics (another prominent early career route, often coupled with weekends at the kitchen table writing literature reviews for publication in an attempt to bolster credentials for a research job in an underfunded field) is also on a downward trajectory. Some 44.3 per cent of teaching only contracts (equating to 64,300 people) were fixed term in 2019-20 – by 2023-24 the numbers were 35.7 per cent and 63,425.

If we take this to provider level we can see that a significant research focus is no predictor of a reliance on fixed term contracts. This chart shows the proportion of all academic staff on research only contracts on the y axis, with the proportion of all academic staff on fixed term contracts on the x axis.

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What this chart shows is that a strong focus on research (with many research only academic contracts) does not predict a reliance on fixed term contracts – indeed, there are many providers with a significant proportion of fixed term contracts that have no research only academic staff at all. While a fixed term contract is a poor basis on which to plan long term as an individual, for many higher education institutions it is a useful answer to wildly varying income and recruitment. Whereas for more traditional institutions it makes sense to maintain capacity even as prevailing conditions worsen, in smaller and more precarious providers unutilised capacity is a luxury that is no longer as affordable.

If you look back to the first chart, you may notice a “salary source” filter. One of the prevailing narratives around fixed term contracts is that these necessarily link to the “fixed term” nature of funded research projects – the argument being that once the money is finished, the staff need to find new jobs. In fact, this is less of a factor than you might imagine: the proportions of research only academic staff on fixed term contracts is higher for externally funded than those funded internally, but the difference isn’t huge.

Plotting the same data another way shows us that around a quarter of research only salaries are funded entirely by the higher education provider, with a further five per cent or so partially supported by the host institution – these figures are slightly lower for fixed-term research only staff, but only very slightly.

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So we can be clear that fixed term salaries are (broadly) a research thing, but there’s not really evidence to suggest that short term external funding is the whole reason for this.

As a quick reminder, the research councils represent about a quarter of all external research funding, with the UK government (in various forms) and the NHS representing about another (swiftly growing)fifth. That’s a hefty chunk of research income that comes from sources that the government has some degree of control over – and some of the language used by Labour before the election about making this more reliable (the ten year settlements of legend) was seen as a recognition of the way funding could be reprofiled to allow for more “livable” research careers and an expansion of research capacity.

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This chart also allows you to examine the way these proportions land differently by provider and subject area (expressed here as HESA cost code). The volatility is higher at smaller providers, as you might expect – while research in the arts and humanities is more likely to be funded by research councils than in STEM or social sciences. But it is really the volume, rather than the source, of research funding that determines how researcher salaries are paid.

Although the established pathway from research postgraduate to research is by no means the only one available (many postgraduate research students do not become academics) it is an established maxim – dating back to the post-war Percy and Barlow reviews – that to produce the researchers we need requires training in the form of postgraduate research provision.

Although it’s not really the purpose of this article, it is worth considering the subject and provider level distribution of postgraduate research students in the light of how funding and capacity for research is distributed. As the early research career is often dominated by the need to move to take on a fixed term contract, one way to address this might be to have research career opportunities and research students in the same place from the start.

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What can we learn from this?

Research capacity, and – for that matter – research training capacity, can’t be turned off and on at a whim. Departments and research centres need more than one short-term funded project to begin delivering for the UK at their full potential, because developing capacity and expertise takes time and experience. That’s a part of the reason why we have non-ringfenced funding: streams like those associated with QR in England – to keep research viable between projects, and to nurture developing expertise so it can contribute meaningfully to national, regional, and industrial research priorities. It’s funds like these that support researcher training and supervision, and the infrastructure and support staff and components that make research possible.

But what the data suggests is that while the short-term nature of project funding does have an impact, especially at smaller providers and emerging research centres, there are many universities that are able to sustain research employment between projects. A part of this is bound to be sheer scale, but it doesn’t happen at all large research performing organisations by any stretch of the imagination. A part of the answer then, must be the strategic decisions and staffing priorities that makes sustaining researcher employment possible.

That’s not to let the funding side of the equation off the hook either. There is a sense that the Labour party was moving in the right direction in considering longer term research funding settlements – but we have yet to learn how this will work in practice. By its very nature, research is discovery and opportunity led: a few years ago artificial intelligence research was a minor academic curiosity, currently it is big money – but will it be a priority in 2035? Could there be some areas – medical and healthcare research, large scale physics, engineering – where we can be more sure than others?

You’ll note we didn’t mention the arts, humanities, and social sciences in that list – but these may be some of the most valuable areas of human activity, and government-supported research plays a more prominent role in sustaining not just discovery and innovation but the actual practice of such activity. Such is the paucity of money available in the arts that many practitioners subsidise their practice with research and teaching – and it feels like arts funding more generally needs consideration.

Sure, the UK punches above its weight in the sciences and in health care – but in arts, heritage, and social policy the work of the UK is genuinely world leading. It has a significant economic impact (second only to financial services) too. Research funding is a part of the picture here, but a long term commitment to these industries would be one of the most valuable decisions a government can make.

What are the other choices?

The fundamental challenge is maintaining a system which is dynamic, where the dynamism is not solely reliant on a highly transient workforce. A simple, albeit extremely limited, conclusion from the data would be that there is too great a supply of researchers to meet the demand for their skills.

The more important question is what is the value of such a highly educated workforce and how can society make the most of their talents. This is not to say the UK should operate a supply led model. A world where funding is allocated based purely on the academic interests of researchers might be good for placing emphasis on intellectual curiosity but it would not allow funders to match social and economic priorities with researcher’s work. Put another way, it isn’t sufficient to tackle climate change by hoping enough researchers are interested in doing so. It would also not necessarily create more permanent jobs – just different ones.

Conversely, a system which is largely demand led loses talent in other ways. The sheer exhaustion of moving between jobs and tacking research skills to different projects in the same field means stamina, not just research ability, is a key criterion for success. This means researchers whose abilities are needed are not deployed because their personal incentive for a more stable life trumps their career aspirations.

The current system does penalise those who cannot work flexibly for extended periods of time, but more fundamentally the incentives in the system are misaligned to what it hopes to achieve. There can be no dynamism without some flexibility, but flexibility should be demonstrable not permanently designed. Flexibility of employment should be used to achieve a research benefit not only an administrative one.

This is not wholly in the gift of universities. A careful consideration by government, funders, institutions, and researchers, of how flexibility should be used is the key to balance in the system. There are times where the research system requires stability. For example, the repeated use of fixed term contracts on the same topic is a clear market signal for more stable employment. Furthermore, it is undesirable to have a forever changing workforce in areas governments have singularly failed to make progress on for decades. Nobody is arguing that if only research into productivity was a bit more transient the UK’s economies woes could be fixed.

The need is coordinated action. And unlike in Australia there is no single review of what the research ecosystem is for. Until then as priorities change, funders work on short time horizons, and institutions respond to ever changing incentives, the downstream effect is a workforce that will be treated as entirely changeable too.
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February 24, 2025
Resilience, flexibility and inclusion: digital transformation at The University of Manchester

As Chief Information Officer, PJ Hemmaway is driving innovation at Manchester to future-proof the university and deliver the best possible day-to-day experience. In this recent interview with Melissa Bowden, Content Writer at Kortext, he shared insights on creating a sector-leading learning environment where everyone can thrive. PJ Hemmaway will be speaking at Kortext LIVE in Manchester on 6 February 2025: you can register here.

Building resilient and flexible systems

The University of Manchester has a bold ambition: to ‘be recognised globally as Europe’s most innovative university’. Since 2022, Hemmaway has been tasked with realising this vision, leading the institution’s digital transformation as Chief Information Officer.

‘As CIO, I have two core aims,’ he says. The first is ‘keeping the operational lights on’ so the university functions effectively now. The second is ensuring ‘we’re future ready – not just for one, three or five years, but for the next fifteen to twenty years’. For Hemmaway, this means making decisions that deliver long-term value, not just quick wins, and taking calculated risks.

Over the last two years, Hemmaway has been implementing several high-level technology strategies, all of which are underpinned by a focus on resilience and flexibility. One project has enhanced digital capabilities by laying ‘foundational building blocks’, such as a new enterprise service management system and a new integration platform, that ‘allow us to streamline workflows and improve access to services that align to our one university theme,’ he says.

Hemmaway’s philosophy of ‘buy, don’t build’ is central to achieving his aims. ‘In the university sector, we’ve got very intelligent people who love to build things,’ he says, ‘but that creates technical debt, skills debt and data debt.’ Instead, he prefers a modular, scalable approach. ‘One of the reasons Manchester’s technology transformation has been so successful is that we’ve been modular and had small pilots – we’ve built on those and we’ve delivered’.

Enhancing institutional intelligence

The next stage of Hemmaway’s digital transformation strategy involves modernising Manchester’s existing data infrastructure. This means replacing older systems, which he prefers to describe as ‘heritage’ rather than ‘legacy’ technology. ‘I’ve got a lot of colleagues who implemented this technology,’ he explains, ‘and it’s part of our heritage as an institution’.

Data is ubiquitous in higher education, yet many universities are still not leveraging it effectively. ‘As a sector, we’re not capitalising on the data we’ve got,’ says Hemmaway, ‘whether it’s research outputs or data from teaching, learning, and professional services ecosystems’.

In response, Hemmaway is keen to foster a culture of data sharing. ‘Gone are the days where we want people to be holding their silos of data,’ says Hemmaway. Instead, by integrating data from multiple sources across the institution and then leveraging analytics tools, the university can benefit from powerful insights into areas like student retention, outcomes and wellbeing.

Bridging the digital divide

People are ‘at the heart’ of Manchester’s strategic plan, with its vision of students and colleagues working together ‘as one connected community’. For Hemmaway, a personal focus on equity and inclusion informs his stewardship of the university’s digital transformation too.

He shares, ‘I come from a humble background but, thanks to my dad, I was very fortunate to have a computer in the late 80s’. When Hemmaway started his career in a bank, this early access gave him an advantage over colleagues who were still unfamiliar with the Internet.

‘It created an imbalance in terms of those that ‘could’ – a digital divide,’ he says. A similar gap is emerging now, with the rapid proliferation of generative AI tools. ‘It is critical to provide equitable access,’ Hemmaway states, ‘otherwise we’re going to see that digital divide again’. But access alone is not sufficient; institutions must help users develop digital confidence too.

As part of this, Hemmaway encourages a risk-based culture of experimentation. ‘Most organisations are risk averse and they lose opportunities,’ he says. Instead, he has been selecting new products – including AI tools – and inviting colleagues to try them out in a trusted and supported environment. Feedback from these trials informs further product development.

Successfully implementing new technology

When asked for advice on technology adoption, Hemmaway emphasises collaboration. ‘My biggest piece of advice is to work with partners’, he says. For him, that means having a network of go-to peers and finding trusted vendors who understand the higher education sector.

Hemmaway is now keen to explore partnering with Kortext, after seeing a demonstration of Kortext fusion – a unified strategic platform developed in collaboration with Microsoft. Following a conference, he was motivated to find a solution built on Microsoft Fabric and ‘I nearly broke my number one principle,’ he jokes. ‘I thought we were going to have to build it, not buy it’.

However, the introduction to Kortext fusion was ‘serendipity’. Going forward, Hemmaway will be working closely with Kortext and Microsoft to explore how the platform can help Manchester to enhance data-driven decision-making and enhance the student experience. He adds, ‘this technology could also help me accelerate my digital-first strategy’, seeing it as a foundation to support flexible and inclusive education with equitable access for all.

The benefits of a unified platform align with Hemmaway’s final thoughts. ‘The world is a complex place,’ he says, ‘and we need to simplify it’. For him, ‘simplification is a number one priority’ for successful digital transformation. Without this, he says, ‘we won’t be efficient, we won’t be flexible, and we won’t have inclusive education in a digital-first environment’.

Join PJ, HEPI Director Nick Hillman and other education and technology expert speakers at a series of three events for HE leaders hosted at Microsoft’s offices in London, Edinburgh and Manchester during late January and early February. Find out more and register your free place here.

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January 23, 2025
Widening access needs more flexibility

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

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

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

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

All about access

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

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

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

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

Understanding the barriers

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

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

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

Flexibility is key

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

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

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

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

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

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

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January 14, 2025