Tag: participation

  • 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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  • What Covid restrictions meant for participation and belonging

    What Covid restrictions meant for participation and belonging

    The emergency online pivot is long gone, yet the “new normal” turned out to be neither of those things.

    The sector continues to wrestle with problems that look suspiciously like academic long covid: falling attendance, concerns about disengagement, and a steep rise in the number of disabled and neurodivergent students and mental health conditions.

    It is tempting to attribute these problems to student attitudes, “Gen Z personalities,” or to blame online provision and the emergence of GenAI. It is equally tempting to respond by going to either extreme, either by doubling down on surveillance and policing student behaviour, or by promising ever greater flexibility.

    But both responses risk forgetting the nuances that the pandemic revealed about inclusion, particularly for students from widening participation backgrounds.

    The best year?

    In our new paper, “The best year / ‘I struggled with everything’: widening participation experiences of pandemic online learning”, we worked with 23 widening participation students at two Scottish universities to understand which aspects of the online pivot supported or undermined their participation. Much of what they recounted echoes the broader literature on Covid and higher education; however, their relative disadvantage magnified their experience.

    The themes we report are particularly salient for current debates about engagement and inclusion, notably, participants kept returning to the question of agency and resources. For many, lockdown removed their commute which made it easier to combine study with caring responsibilities, jobs, and health conditions. But it also gave them back hours they would have otherwise spent on public transport as well as the associated cost, a change described as transformative and for one student “The best year.”

    At the same time, the very flexibility that some students valued intensified existing inequalities for others. Many struggled with poor broadband, limited devices shared with family members, and the absence of quiet spaces. One student described how “online learning brought my work to a grinding halt” because without a dedicated study space they “struggled with everything.” Without access to campus libraries and study spaces, watching recordings rather than coming in for lectures actually reduced their control over the learning environment.

    Belonging and the incidental

    Participants also emphasised that belonging and authentic connection underlies so much of what we do as educators. Widening participation students have long described the effort of trying to “fit in” to institutions that were not built with them in mind, and the tension between wanting to succeed academically and not wanting to stand out socially. The relative anonymity made possible by online learning made some students more willing to type questions in the chat or attend virtual office hours. However, participants were also clear that online interactions with staff felt transactional and when every meeting had to be booked and justified, it made everything feel more formal.

    What they missed were the incidental conversations before and after class, the chance encounters in corridors and libraries, and seemingly purposeless chit-chat with peers that allowed them to compare progress, make sense of expectations, and realise that they were not the only ones struggling.

    And our study draws attention to the hidden curriculum and the role of self-regulation. Widening participation students are less likely to arrive at university familiar with tacit rules about how to study, when it is acceptable to ask for help, or how to navigate institutional systems. Our participants described how moving online removed opportunities to learn vicariously by watching how others behaved in class, by overhearing peers ask questions, or by observing how more experienced students managed their workload. Without these cues, those who already felt they did not belong were even more reluctant to reach out, particularly if they worried about adding to staff workload.

    Psychologically, these experiences connect to work on self-efficacy and self-regulated learning, which show that students who doubt their academic capability are less likely to seek help, persist with difficult tasks, or adapt their strategies after setbacks. We also saw strong links with self-determination theory, which argues that three basic needs underpin intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Flexible engagement can clearly enhance autonomy, especially for students with complex lives. However, if we neglect competence and relatedness, greater autonomy simply becomes greater responsibility without corresponding support.

    A bit of distance

    Part of the reason we’re writing about this now is that thanks to the timeline of academic publishing, the authorship team collectively experienced double digit covid infections, three promotions, two College restructures, and the creation and birth of two humans in the time it took to publish our study. But part of the reason is that sometimes a bit of distance is needed to truly understand the most important lessons and to see that our new problems and potential solutions, are actually rather familiar.

    Universities must protect and normalise flexible learning options that confer genuine agency and must not use concerns about engagement to punish the most vulnerable. For example, the evidence that recorded lectures improve accessibility for disabled students and those from widening participation backgrounds is now substantial and removing this flexibility in the name of “getting students back” risks penalising those for whom education might be the only way out.

    But it is also just as vital that we conceptualise campus presence as an inclusion issue and recognise that to frame the need to attend as exclusionary is to misunderstand the issue. Students who lack quiet study space at home are disadvantaged when too much learning is pushed out of the timetable. Our participants were clear that regular, structured time on campus was not the enemy of flexibility; it was the scaffold that allowed them to make use of flexible resources. When deciding whether to keep online exams, flip a module, or consolidate teaching into fewer longer blocks, it is essential to ask where and when students will actually be able to study and how their contact with both staff and students will be impacted if campus time is reduced.

    If we want higher education to be genuinely inclusive, we need to resist trying to find simple solutions to complex problems – banning lecture recordings and arguing that in-person exams are always/never (in)appropriate are comforting solutions because they’re concrete, not because they’re right. The experiences of widening participation students during lockdown reinforce that inclusion is less about offering students unlimited choice and more about designing flexible structures that combine agency, support, and connection. Those structures are likely to benefit all students but if we ignore them, we will once again ask those with the least social and material capital to shoulder the greatest share of the risk.

    This article is based on research carried out with colleagues Jacqui Hutchison, Alison Browitt and Jill MacKay, whose contributions we gratefully acknowledge.

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  • WEEKEND READING: Student working lives: paid work and access and participation

    WEEKEND READING: Student working lives: paid work and access and participation

    This blog was kindly authored by Martin Lowe, Professor Adrian Wright, Dr Mark Wilding and Mary Lawler from the University of Lancashire, authors of Student Working Lives (HEPI report 195).

    The clearest finding of our recent HEPI report, Student Working Lives, was the growing prevalence of paid work among students and its profound impact on their experiences and outcomes.

    This trend is not confined to disadvantaged groups; it is now a reality for the majority of students, with the Advance HE and HEPI Student Academic Experience Survey revealing how 68% of students now work during term time. Yet, despite its significance, paid work remains largely absent from regulatory frameworks designed to promote equality of opportunity in higher education.

    As the Office for Students (OfS) reviews its approach to access and participation, we argue that paid work should be recognised as a distinct risk on the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register (EORR). Doing so would enable providers to respond more effectively to the challenges students face and ensure that widening participation efforts reflect the realities of modern student life.

    A risk-based future for access and participation

    Since taking office, the Labour Government has placed widening participation as a central pillar of its higher education agenda. From the introduction of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement to the creation of a new Access and Participation Task and Finish Group, ministers have signalled their determination to open doors to learners from non-traditional backgrounds.

    This ambition was reiterated in the recent Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper, which proposed a significant shift in the regulatory approach in England:

    We will reform regulation of access and participation plans, moving away from a uniform approach to one where the Office for Students can be more risk-based.

    While this statement attracted less attention than the more headline-grabbing measures on tuition fees and maintenance grants, it represents a potentially transformative change. A risk-based model could allow the OfS to focus on the most pressing barriers to equality of opportunity, provided those risks are accurately identified.

    The existing EORR complements this approach. Having been introduced under the leadership of outgoing Director of Fair Access and Participation at the OfS, John Blake, the register has already been widely welcomed by the sector. By identifying factors that threaten access and success for disadvantaged student groups, it enables providers to design interventions tailored to their own context. Rather than simply seeking to address outcome gaps, the EORR encourages institutions to tackle the underlying causes.

    However, the register is not static. If it is to remain relevant, it must evolve to reflect emerging challenges. One such challenge is the growing necessity of paid work alongside study, a risk that intersects the financial pressures felt by students but extends far beyond them.

    Paid work is more than a financial issue

    The current EORR already identifies ‘Cost Pressures’ as a risk, acknowledging that rising living costs can undermine students’ ability to complete their course or achieve good grades. Yet this framing is too narrow on its own. Paid work is not merely a symptom of financial strain; it’s a complex factor that shapes engagement, attainment, and progression into graduate employment.

    Our research shows that paid work is a necessity for most students, regardless of background, with average hours worked remaining static across each Indices of Deprivation (IMD) quintile. However, its impact is uneven. Students having to work more than 20 hours per week, those employed in particularly demanding sectors and those balancing caring responsibilities may all face challenges due to increased workload. However each should be supported in different ways.

    Figure 1: Likelihood of obtaining a ‘good’ honours degree by work hours

    These patterns matter because they influence both academic performance and participation in enrichment activities that support retention and employability. Paid work is a structural feature of student life that can amplify existing inequalities, but present specific nuances depending on the local context.

    Our analysis highlights how the risks associated with paid work differ across institutions and how regional labour markets shape patterns of student employment. For instance, our survey indicates a higher proportion of students working in health and social care in Lancashire, where the sector represents 15% of total employment. In contrast, Liverpool’s relatively large share of hospitality student workers reflects the sector’s prominence, accounting for around 10% of jobs in the city region. These different contexts can help steer local interventions to reduce risk associated with particular sectors.

    Figure 2: Employment by top four sectors (multiple responses accepted)

    Recognising paid work as a formal risk would help empower institutions to develop context-sensitive strategies. These might include the crediting of paid work within the curriculum, embedding guidance on employment rights within pastoral support, or designing schedules that accommodate students’ working patterns.

    Access and participation – two sides of the same coin

    As the OfS explores separating out the “Access” and “Participation” strands of its regulatory framework – as outlined in their recent quality consultation – paid work should feature prominently in supporting both ambitions. Widening access is not simply about opening the door; it is about ensuring wider groups of students see themselves as being part of that experience. For some mature learners, carers, and those with financial dependencies (who may feel excluded by the traditional delivery model of higher education) the support to balance paid work and study is critical.

    Ignoring this reality risks undermining the very goals of widening participation. Higher education must adapt to the evolving profile of its students, who increasingly diverge from the outdated stereotype of the full-time undergraduate.

    Our recommendation is for the OfS to prioritise paid work as a key aspect of the future of Access and Participation regulation, inserting it as a distinct risk within the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register. Doing so would:

    • signal its importance as a structural factor affecting equality of opportunity;
    • enable targeted interventions that reflect institutional and regional contexts;
    • support innovation in curriculum design, pastoral care, and timetabling;
    • and promote collaboration between universities, employers, and policymakers to improve job quality and flexibility.

    This is not about discouraging students from working. For many, employment provides valuable experience and skills. Instead, it is about recognising that when work becomes a necessity rather than a choice, it can compromise educational outcomes, especially for those already at the margins.

    The OfS has an opportunity to lead the sector in addressing one of the most pressing challenges facing students today. By treating paid work as a formal risk, it can help ensure that access and participation strategies are grounded in the lived realities of learners.

    As we look to the future, one principle should guide the sector: widening participation does not end at the point of entry. It extends throughout the student journey, encompassing the conditions that enable success. Paid work is now not only part of that journey, but a critical factor.

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  • After-school meal participation still below pre-COVID levels, FRAC finds

    After-school meal participation still below pre-COVID levels, FRAC finds

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    Dive Brief:

    • While the number of children receiving after-school snacks and suppers through the federal Afterschool Nutrition Programs increased slightly from October 2023 to October 2024, participation still remained below pre-pandemic levels, according to a report released Wednesday by the Food Research & Action Center.
    • The Afterschool Supper Programs, for instance, served 1.26 million students on an average weekday in October 2024 — a 2.8% rise from October 2023, FRAC found. Despite those gains, the report said, roughly 173,400 fewer children received after-school suppers in October 2024 compared to October 2019.
    • Many more children could benefit from after-school meals, FRAC said, adding that only 1 in 16 children who participated in the federal free or reduced price school lunch program in October 2024 received a meal from the Afterschool Supper Programs.

    Dive Insight:

    Even though the recent data shows more students were served after-school suppers compared to before the COVID-19 pandemic, the FRAC report said that the program reached “far too few children.” 

    Historic one-time federal pandemic emergency aid helped boost funding for after-school programs and ultimately expanded after-school meal access, but those federal dollars have mostly expired and been spent, the report added. 

    The two federal Afterschool Nutrition Programs are the Child and Adult Care Food Program and the National School Lunch Program, which both provide funding to serve snacks and suppers to children during educational and enrichment programming. The funding is distributed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture through state agencies, typically state departments of education, health or agriculture.  

    The CACFP At-Risk Afterschool Supper and Snack Program reimburses public and private

    nonprofit schools, local government agencies, and private nonprofit organizations for serving food to children 18 years and younger during educational programs running after school, on weekends or during school holidays. NSLP also reimburses public and private nonprofit schools for providing after-school snacks to children, but it does not include supper.

    The FRAC report noted that if every state served supper to 15 children out of every 100 who come from low-income families and participated in school lunch in October 2024, then over 1.8 million students would have received an after-school supper. That also means another $163.5 million in federal reimbursed funds would have been available to support after-school meal programs in that month alone if all qualified states participated. 

    Crystal FitzSimons, president of FRAC, said in a Wednesday statement that Congress and local communities must do more to help increase the number of children who access quality after-school programs that offer suppers and snacks.

    “Families are facing rising food costs, and many parents are working long hours just to get by,” FitzSimons said. “The Afterschool Nutrition Programs help families stretch tight household budgets and ensure children get the nutrition and programming they need to learn and thrive.”

    To boost student participation in after-school supper and snack programs, FRAC recommends some of these policy changes:

    • Consolidate after-school and summer nutrition programs. Many local organizations and government agencies have to switch between operating the Afterschool Meal Program under CACFP and the Summer Food Service Program, even though the same children are often served throughout the year. Consolidating the two programs into a single year-round operation under SFSP would allow programs to reach more children effectively.
    • Expand NSLP to allow school food authorities to also serve suppers. Schools would be more incentivized to serve suppers if NSLP didn’t limit their after-school programs to serving only snacks. Currently, schools must operate under the CACFP to serve a full meal during after-school hours, which adds “unnecessary administrative burden.”
    • Lower the area eligibility threshold.  To qualify for after-school nutrition programs, sites must be in areas where at least 50% of children qualify for free or reduced price school meals. That eligibility percentage should drop to 40% to expand access to more communities, particularly in rural and suburban communities with high needs but less concentrated poverty. 

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  • Widening participation cold spots: why we can’t afford to wait until they turn 16

    Widening participation cold spots: why we can’t afford to wait until they turn 16

    This blog was kindly authored by Dr Emily Magrath, Director of Programme Development and Impact at IntoUniversity.

    After fielding a flurry of questions from the classroom of 7 and 8 year olds – ‘what is my favourite colour?’, ‘Is this a university?’, ‘Do staff sleep in the building at night?’ – we settle together to explore the question: ‘what is a career?’ Today, this looks like high-vis jackets and hard hats for civil engineers to plan the needed infrastructure for a town; paleontologists codifying discovered fossils; and foley artists creating a soundscape for a forest epic. The students identify the skills they have used and tell me their many ambitions – the room includes possible footballers, doctors, engineers, nurses, lawyers, fashion designers, a taxi driver (like his dad) and a mathematician. This is a starting point, one which gives them years to think about their future possibilities and, more importantly, to build the knowledge and skills to make them future realities. 

    The potential for talent is everywhere

    Geography has become a primary driver of inequality in the UK. Despite initiatives to widen access to university and despite increases in higher education progression rates, areas remain where progression rates and education outcomes remain persistently and stubbornly low. As recently articulated by Alan Francis OBE, Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, this continues to ‘waste talent and limit potential’ across the UK. 

    Mounting evidence is stark in emphasising the particular challenges of these areas, so-called cold spots, which are, in reality, places systematically starved of opportunity with intersecting barriers: geographical isolation; lack of or expensive transport options; lack of teacher quality; and a lack of graduate jobs. Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who want to pursue higher education in these locations face hard choices, often commuting to university, struggling to pursue their chosen career in their local area or having to leave it behind. It is not a surprise then to see the UPP Foundation’s inquiry on Higher Education attitudes in Doncaster this year determining that for many young people university is seen as a “bad bet.”

    In the face of these challenging intersections, starting widening participation work at 16 or 17, (or even 14 or 15) is too late. Interventions beginning at these points ultimately have failed many students in these regions – approaches must be anchored from primary age. 

    Why start at primary age?

    It is clear that students from disadvantaged backgrounds face additional educational barriers. Their starting point often shows significant gaps to more advantaged peers, and without intervention, these can become entrenched well before secondary school. In 2023, the Education Policy Institute estimated the disadvantage learning gap at age 5 to be 4.6 months. This was wider than it had been prior to the pandemic. Furthermore, in some areas of deprivation, 50% of young people begin school with delayed language development.

    There are no easy solutions, but earlier intervention is essential for building learning progress, fostering positive educational experiences and supporting students to acquire necessary qualifications for progression to higher education. 

    I would like to study accounting. I want to be rich and I love maths. I would like to study at Oxford university because it’s one of the best universities 

    Year 6 student, IntoUniversity

    Alongside academic development, the implicit and explicit messaging young people hear is key. Young people are full of aspirations, but they need to hear not only how to connect these to actual pathways, but also that they can achieve them. Otherwise, their beliefs can become fixed – often in early teenage years – that university is not for ‘people like them’.

    An antidote to this is to start conversations early and normalise university spaces. I have seen powerful examples of how sustained work can make a difference: a widening participation officer telling 10 and 11 year olds that the local university was “their university,’ they were welcome to ask questions and find out what happened there; seeing toddlers at ease climbing over benches in a lecture theatre at a family learning day; and the 18 year old who told me they just assumed they would go to the city’s university because ‘you took me there every year since I was little’. 

    Building place based ecosystems

    Just after the pandemic, I met a father photographing his son in a graduation gown and mortar board at one of our primary graduation trips to a university – the culmination of a programme where students have imagined a university future for themselves. He proudly showed me photos of his older children in previous years (fortuitously aged so that none had missed out during the pandemic). This engagement with the university was a touchstone for each child and for the family.

    The children go through the programme in Year 4, 5 and 6, and so they know it’s coming, and their siblings know it’s coming. They have an aspiration, and they know about what’s next. It’s a clear message for our school. Education is a journey, it continues in Secondary school and beyond and opens up opportunities. Because it is built into our curriculum, university feels like an entitlement for them. It is available for them.

    Primary School Headteacher about IntoUniversity primary school programme

    The recent Ruskin Institute for Social Equality’s report on coastal cold spots this year similarly emphasised geography’s critical role in higher education access. It showed that, accounting for similar backgrounds, young people can experience as much as a fivefold difference in their likelihood of progressing to HE based on where they live. The report argued that a move away from ‘collaborative, place-based, cross-sector approach’ to one emphasising individual universities’ targets has not served these areas well. 

    Consistent, long-term, sustained work from an early age is the only path forward when countering the entrenched challenges of cold spot areas. These are not challenges that can be solved by one intervention, one school, one charity or one university. Young people in these places need ecosystems of sustained support and opportunities available from an early age. That is how we can shift the dial on persistently low progression rates and ensure equitable access to higher education for all young people, regardless of where they live. 

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  • 6 Effective Ways to Build Attention and Boost Student Participation – Faculty Focus

    6 Effective Ways to Build Attention and Boost Student Participation – Faculty Focus

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  • What does the post-16 education and skills white paper say about access and participation?

    What does the post-16 education and skills white paper say about access and participation?

    Author:
    Charlotte Armstrong

    Published:

    This blog was authored by Charlotte Armstrong, Policy Manager at HEPI.

    It is the second blog in HEPI’s series responding to the post-16 education and skills white paper. You can find the first blog here.

    Despite the post-16 education and skills white paper devoting an entire sub-section to ‘Improving Access and Participation’, the genuine challenges facing students receive minimal attention. The skills agenda within the Government is so strong that the paper frames students, and the student experience, in terms of their potential future contribution to the economy and regional growth. This results in little attempt to understand and address the student experience and the very real challenges that students are currently facing.

    A shift to the skills agenda

    The Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) takes up several bullet points within this section of the paper. In fact, the decision to categorise the LLE under the heading of access provides an interesting insight into the Government’s broader approach to access and participation. Considering the LLE as a subsection of this initiative reframes the focus of access from entrance to higher education to employment outcomes and progression throughout a person’s life. This shift is an idea repeated throughout the white paper that dovetails with the Government’s skills agenda. It indicates that the Government views higher education as a means to add future value to the economy and a tool through which its Industrial Strategy can be furthered. This approach leaves little room for those subjects and disciplines that fall outside the strategy, let alone for learning for its own sake.

    Both modular LLE courses and the newly announced maintenance grants (as announced within the white paper, and previously at the Labour Party Conference) are available only to those studying courses that link to the Government’s wider Industrial Strategy. As may be easily guessed, this results in a list of subjects that largely dovetail with the science and technology sectors – arts and humanities subjects don’t get a look in. Tying maintenance grants to the study of pre-approved science subjects risks disincentivising students from low-income backgrounds from pursuing arts and humanities subjects – potentially entrenching bias and elitism within this sector, as well as furthering the narrative of ‘Mickey Mouse degrees’. As the costs of studying at university continue to rise, some prospective students will struggle to justify studying the subject of their choice if it means losing out on access to maintenance grants. Many of these excluded subjects are already in crisis – as the HEPI / Duolingo report The Language Crisis: Arresting Decline demonstrates, undergraduate enrolments in ‘Language & Area Studies’ have decreased by 20% in five years. Disincentivising students from taking these courses will surely only deepen this crisis further.

    These criticisms do not mean the LLE and the reintroduction of maintenance grants are bad policies. The latter is a particularly welcome development that has long been campaigned for by HEPI and the National Union of Students. However, the limited nature of their current form limits the positive impact they could otherwise have. While there is no current clarification on the precise threshold that will be placed on access to maintenance grants, the Government’s lack of movement on the parental income thresholds within the student finance system likely means only a very small number of students will be eligible.

    When first announcing this policy at the Labour Party conference, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson claimed that the reintroduction of maintenance grants would ensure students spent their time at university ‘learning or training, not working every hour God sends’. This perhaps suggests that maintenance grants will be available in addition to, not instead of, the maintenance loan for those eligible students, although we keenly await the detail which will be outlined by the Chancellor in the upcoming Budget. However, this doesn’t solve the deepening financial crisis facing a large number of students in higher education – many of whom simply will not be eligible for the new maintenance grants.

    HEPI’s research into the Minimum Income Standard for Students highlights how the current maximum maintenance loan covers just half of the costs faced by freshers. Furthermore, the parental income threshold for eligibility for the maximum loan is currently so out of touch that a student from a household with a single parent earning just above the minimum wage will not be eligible for the maximum loan. The Government has sought to highlight that maintenance loans will increase in line with forecast inflation for every academic year, but this is merely a continuation of the current policy and will not address the financial crisis that many students face. Plus, forecast inflation tends to be lower than actual inflation. Similarly, the promise that care leavers will automatically become eligible to receive the maximum rate of loan is also a reiteration of a policy already in place. Care leavers (and estranged students) are classified as independent and therefore are eligible for the maximum loan. To reiterate, this maximum loan covers only half of the costs these students will face while at university.

    Postgraduate access

    The inclusion of postgraduate access in the white paper is a welcome addition – and an unsurprising one when considering how this white paper has framed access in terms of career progression and skills. However, once more, the inclusion of postgraduate students within access goals falls short due to a failure to address the root causes of the widening crises for home postgraduate students in England. Postgraduate taught tuition fees now exceed the maximum postgraduate loan – meaning that a student has used up their entire loan before even considering their cost of living.

    Instead of engaging with this, the paper encourages providers to include postgraduate study in their Access and Participation Plans (APP). This is, in itself, a positive development; however, without addressing the financial barriers faced by many prospective postgraduate students, this inclusion will have very limited impact.

    The access and participation section of the post-16 education and skills white paper provides an insight into how this Government conceives of these issues. However, the focus on students as future employees paints a worrying picture of a Government that is more concerned with next steps than with higher education itself.

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  • SAT and ACT participation remains below pre-pandemic levels

    SAT and ACT participation remains below pre-pandemic levels

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    Dive Brief:

    • Five years after COVID-19 shut down classrooms and shifted college admissions testing policies, the SAT and ACT are still drawing fewer students than during pre-pandemic years.
    • Some 1.38 million students took the ACT in 2025 compared to 1.78 million in 2019, and about 2 million students took the SAT this year versus 2.22 million in 2019, data released recently by the testing companies show. 
    • ​​​​​​​SAT scores, meanwhile, increased only slightly from the high school class of 2024 to the class of 2025, while ACT scores stayed about level. In both cases, scores fell below those from the pre-pandemic year of 2019. 

    Dive Insight:

    The slight uptick in SAT scores and level ACT scores for the high school graduating class of 2025 are still positive trends compared to last year, when average scores on both tests declined year-over-year compared to 2023.

    Still, SAT scores were still “substantially lower than average scores prior to the pandemic,” said College Board, the organization that publishes the test. In 2025, average SAT scores were 521 in reading and writing and 508 in math. In 2019, those averages were 10 points higher for reading and writing (531) and 20 points higher for math (528).

    The ACT average composite score, 19.4, also fell lower than the 2019 score of 20.7.

    For ACT test-takers, 30% met three or more of the four college readiness benchmarks in English, math, reading and science. The ACT benchmarks indicate that students have a 50% chance of earning a B or better in first-year college courses of the same subject and a 75% chance of a C or better. 

    Meanwhile, the dip in overall test takers for both exams continues a trend that dates to at least the pandemic, when colleges shifted toward test-optional policies. For the ACT, however, the numbers began declining much earlier. 

    While testing experts had expected the pandemic to trigger a shift away from K-12 standardized tests, ​​that didn’t materialize to a great degree and standardized and high-stakes testing are still core to K-12. 

    More than 90% of four-year colleges in the U.S. were not expected to require applicants for fall 2026 admission to submit ACT or SAT scores, according to data released in September by FairTest, a nonprofit that advocates for limiting college entrance exams. That’s over 2,000 of the nation’s bachelor-degree granting institutions. 

    Since fall 2020, the number of test-optional or test-free colleges have increased overall, the organization’s annual count shows.

    In the meantime, FairTest said the number of institutions requiring entrance exams minimally increased — from 154 for fall 2025 admissions to 160 for fall 2026 admissions.

    “While a handful of schools have reinstated testing requirements over the past two admissions cycles for a variety of institutional reasons and in response to external pressures, ACT/SAT-optional and test-blind/score-free policies remain the normal baseline in undergraduate admissions,” said FairTest Executive Director Harry Feder in a September statement. “Test-optional policies continue to dominate at national universities, state flagships, and selective liberal arts colleges.”

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  • Defunding Level 7 apprenticeships will undermine widening participation efforts in Higher Education

    Defunding Level 7 apprenticeships will undermine widening participation efforts in Higher Education

    This blog was kindly authored by Professor Abigail Marks, Associate Dean of Research, Newcastle University Business School, and member of the Chartered Association of Business Schools Policy Committee.

    From January 2026, public funding for the vast majority of Level 7 apprenticeships in England will be withdrawn for learners aged 22 and over. Funding will remain for those aged 16 to 21, alongside narrow exceptions for care leavers and learners with Education, Health and Care Plans. Current apprentices will continue to be supported. Ministers present the change as a rebalancing of spending toward younger learners and lower levels, where they argue returns are higher and budgets are more constrained.

    At first sight, this decision looks like a simple trade-off: concentrating scarce resources on school-leavers and early career entrants, while expecting employers to bear the costs of advanced, Master’s-level training. For business schools, however, particularly those that have invested in Level 7 pathways, such as the Senior Leader Apprenticeship, the implications for widening participation are likely to be profound. The Senior Leader Apprenticeship is often integrated with an MBA or Executive MBA. Alongside this, many institutions align Level 7 apprenticeships with specialist MSc degrees, often with embedded professional accreditation. In essence, Level 7 apprenticeships in business schools provide structured, work-based routes into advanced leadership and management education, usually culminating in an MBA or MSc.

    Why Level 7 apprenticeships matter for widening participation

    Since the apprenticeship levy was introduced in 2017, Level 7 programmes have provided business schools with a powerful route to widen participation, particularly among groups that have been historically excluded from postgraduate education. According to the Department for Education’s 2023 Apprenticeship Evaluation, almost half (48 per cent) of Level 7 apprentices are first-generation students, with neither parent having attended university, and around one in five live in the most deprived areas of the country. Analysis by the Chartered Association of Business Schools shows that in 2022/23, a quarter of business and management Level 7 apprentices held no prior degree qualification before starting, with a small minority having no formal qualifications at all. The age profile further underscores the differences between these learners and conventional Master’s students, with 88 per cent of business and management Level 7 apprentices aged over 31, indicating that these programmes primarily serve mature learners and career changers rather than recent graduates.

    This picture contrasts sharply with the traditional MBA market, both in the UK and internationally. Research on MBA demographics from the Association of MBAs in 2023 highlights that students are typically in their late twenties to early thirties, often already possessing a strong undergraduate degree and professional background, and participation is skewed toward those with access to significant financial resources. An Office for Students analysis of Higher Education Statistics Agency data shows that conventional graduate business and management entrants are disproportionately from higher socio-economic backgrounds, with lower representation from disadvantaged areas compared to undergraduate cohorts. In practice, this means that the subsidised Level 7 apprenticeship route has been one of the few mechanisms allowing those without financial capital, prior academic credentials, or family background in higher education to gain access to advanced management education in business schools.

    The economic and societal cost of defunding Level 7

    Employer behaviour is likely to shift in predictable ways once the subsidy is removed. Some large levy-paying firms may continue to sponsor a limited number of Level 7 places, but many smaller employers, as well as organisations in the public and third sectors, will struggle to justify the full cost. Data from the Chartered Management Institute suggests that 60 per cent of Level 7 management apprentices are in public services such as the NHS, social care, and local government. Less than 10 per cent are in FTSE 350 companies. Consequently, there is a risk of further narrowing provision to those already in advantaged positions.

    The progression ladder is also threatened. Level 7 apprenticeships have been a natural progression for people who began at Levels 3 to 5, building their qualifications as they moved into supervisory roles. Closing the door at this point reinforces the glass ceiling for those seeking to rise from technical or frontline work into leadership. With data from the Department for Education reported in FE Week reporting that 89 per cent of Level 7 apprentices are currently aged over 22, the vast majority of those who have benefited from these opportunities will be excluded from January 2026.

    The consequences extend beyond widening participation metrics. Leadership and management skills are consistently linked to firm-level productivity and the diffusion of innovation. Studies such as the World Management Survey have shown that effective management correlates strongly with higher productivity and competitiveness. Restricting adult access to advanced apprenticeships risks slowing the spread of these practices across the economy. For business schools, it reduces their ability to act as engines of regional development and knowledge transfer. At a national level, the UK’s prospects for growth depend not only on new entrants but also on upskilling the existing workforce. Apprenticeships have been one of the few proven ways of achieving this. If opportunities narrow, it is possible that firms may struggle to adopt new technologies, deliver green transitions, or address regional productivity gaps. The effects may also be felt in export performance, scale-up survival, and international competitiveness.

    The removal of public funding for adults over 21 threatens to dismantle a pathway that has enabled business schools to transform the profile of their postgraduate cohorts. Where once mature students, first-generation graduates, and learners from deprived regions could progress into Master’s-level management education, the policy shift risks returning provision in England to a preserve of the already advantaged. In contrast, our European counterparts, where degree and higher-level apprenticeships retain open access for adults, will continue to allow business schools to deliver on widening participation commitments across the life course.

    Lessons from Europe

    Germany’s dual study system has expanded, with degree-apprenticeship style programmes now making up almost five per cent of higher education enrolments. Data from the OECD shows that the proportion of young adults aged 25–34 with a tertiary degree in Germany has risen to around 40 per cent, driven partly by these integrated vocational–academic routes. Switzerland shows even more dramatic results: between 2000 and 2021, the share of 25–34-year-olds with a tertiary qualification rose from 26 to 52 per cent. Crucially, Switzerland also leads Europe in lifelong learning, with around 67.5 per cent of adults aged 25–65 participating in continuing education and training. For Swiss business schools, this creates a mature, diverse learner base and allows firms to continually upgrade leadership and management capacity. Both countries demonstrate how keeping lifelong pathways open is central to sustaining firm-level productivity, innovation, and international competitiveness.

    Conclusion

     The decision to defund most adult participation at Level 7 thus represents more than a budgetary tweak. It narrows opportunities in advanced management education and risks reversing progress in widening participation. Unless English business schools, employers, and policymakers act swiftly to design new pathways, the effect will be a return to elite provision. More worryingly, England risks falling behind international counterparts in building the leadership capacity that underpins innovation, productivity, and growth.

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  • OfS Access and Participation data dashboards, 2025 release

    OfS Access and Participation data dashboards, 2025 release

    The sector level dashboards that cover student characteristics have a provider-level parallel – the access and participation dashboards do not have a regulatory role but are provided as evidence to support institutions develop access and participation plans.

    Though much A&P activity is pre-determined – the current system pretty much insists that universities work with schools locally and address stuff highlighted in the national Equality of Outcomes Risk Register (EORR). It’s a cheeky John Blake way of embedding a national agenda into what are meant to be provider level plans (that, technically, unlock the ability to charge fees up to the higher level) but it could also be argued that provider specific work (particularly on participation measures rather than access) has been underexamined.

    The A&P dashboards are a way to focus attention on what may end up being institutionally bound problems – the kinds of things that providers can fix, and quickly, rather than the socio-economic learning revolution end of things that requires a radicalised cadre of hardened activists to lead and inspire the proletariat, or something.

    We certainly don’t get any detailed mappings between numeric targets declared in individual plans and the data – although my colleague Jim did have a go at that a while ago. Instead this is just the raw information for you to examine, hopefully in an easier to use and speedier fashion than the official version (which requires a user guide, no less)

    Fun with indicators

    There are four dashboards here, covering most of what OfS presents in the mega-board. Most of what I’ve done examines four year aggregations rather than individual years (though there is a timeseries at provider level), I’ve just opted for the 95 per cent confidence interval to show the significance of indicator values, and there’s a few other minor pieces that I’ve not bothered with or set a sensible default on.

    I know that nobody reads this for data dashboard design tips, but for me a series of simpler dashboards are far more useful to the average reader than a single behemoth that can do anything – and the way HESA presents (in the main) very simple tables or plain charts to illustrate variations across the sector represents to me a gold standard for provider level data. OfS is a provider of official statistics, and as such is well aware that section V3.1 of the code of practice requires that:

    Statistics, data and explanatory material should be relevant and presented in a clear, unambiguous way that supports and promotes use by all types of users

    And I don’t think we are quite there yet with what we have, while the simple release of a series of flat tables might get us closer

    If you like it you should have put a confidence interval on it

    To start with, here is a tool for constructing ranked displays of providers against a single metric – here defined as a life cycle stage (access, continuation, completion, attainment, progression) expressed as a percentage of successful achievements for a given subgroup.

    Choose your split indicator type on the top right, and the actual indicator on the top right – select the life cycle stage on the box in the middle, and set mode and level (note certain splits and stages may only be available for certain modes and levels). You can highlight a provider of interest using the box on the bottom right, and also find an overall sector average by searching on “*”. The colours show provider group, and the arrows are upper and lower confidence bounds at the standard 95 per cent level.

    You’ll note that some of the indicators show intersections – with versions of multiple indicators shown together. This allows you to look at, say, white students from a more deprived background. The denominator in the tool tip is the number students in that population, not the number of students where data is available.

    [singles rank]

    I’ve also done a version allowing you to look at all single indicators at a provider level – which might help you to spot particular outliers that may need further analysis. Here, each mark is a split indicator (just the useful ones, I’ve omitted stuff like “POLAR quintiles 1,2,4, and 5” which is really only worth bothering with for gap analysis), you can select provider, mode, and level at the top and highlight a split group (eg “Age (broad)”) or split (eg “Mature aged 21 and over”).

    Note here that access refers to the proportion of all entrants from a given sub-group, so even though I’ve shown it on the same axis for the sake of space it shows a slightly different thing – the other lifecycle stages relate to a success (be that in continuation, progression or whatever) based on how OfS defines “success”.

    [singles provider]

    Oops upside your head

    As you’ve probably spotted from the first section, to really get things out of this data you need to compare splits with other relevant splits. We are talking, then, about gaps – on any of the lifecycle stages – between two groups of students. The classic example is the attainment gap between white and Black students, but you can have all kinds of gaps.

    This first one is across a single provider, and for the four lifecycle stages (this time, we don’t get access) you can select your indicator type and two indicators to get the gap between them (mode, and level, are at the bottom of the screen). When you set your two split, the largest or most common group tends to be on indicator 1 – that’s just the way the data is designed.

    [gaps provider]

    As a quick context you can look for “*” again on the provider name filter to get sector averages, but I’ve also built a sector ranking to help you put your performance in context with similar providers.

    This is like a cross between the single ranking and the provider-level gaps analysis – you just need to set the two splits in the same way.

    [gaps rank]

    Sign o’ the times

    The four year aggregates are handy for most applications, but as you being to drill in you are going to start wondering about individual years – are things getting gradually worse or gradually better? Here I’ve plotted all the individual year data we get – which is, of course, different for each lifecycle stage (because of when data becomes available). This is at a provider level (filter on the top right) and I’ve included confidence intervals at 95 per cent in a lighter colour.

    [gaps provider timeseries]

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