Widening Participation in Higher Education

Higher education (HE) has the potential to be transformative: for individuals, local communities and for the wider society. The extent to which HE succeeds, however, depends on many factors. At a minimum, for higher education to transform lives, individuals from a wide range of backgrounds must apply to and participate in HE [1]. Certainly this has been the rhetoric of successive UK governments dating back as far as The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (1997) [2] and before that The Robbins Report [3], though the vision of what widening participation in the UK context really means has changed over time. Early commentators in the 1950s and 1960s, when only one in twenty of the population attended university, envisaged that access would be widened to the “bright poor”, i.e., those achieving particularly well in selective grammar schools. Later the focus started to shift to the issue of better access for women, as the HE sector started to expand and women, largely from middle class backgrounds who previously would not have gone to university, started to enrol. Most recently, for some it has come to mean not just access for the very able and well qualified from poor backgrounds but also those who could benefit from HE, despite having underachieved in school due to their disadvantaged circumstances and, implicitly, their poor quality schooling in many cases. This shift in emphasis in terms of the target cohort(s) of widening participation has resulted in many institutions adopting contextualised admissions, namely taking students’ circumstances into account in admissions offers —a process which, it must be said, is often not entirely transparent. Yet despite these developments and many decades of both rhetoric and policy, current evidence still suggests that in the UK the likelihood of applying to, and participating in, HE continues to vary dramatically according to family background (e.g., [4–9]). In this special edition we publish four papers that look at quite distinct aspects of this major societal problem. Analysis of large scale administrative data on students’ progression through the education system has suggested that most of the socio-economic gap in HE participation in England can be explained by the fact that poorer students have lower levels of attainment at GCSE and Key Stage 5 [7,10]. This would seem to imply that interventions at the point of application or entry to university alone are unlikely to be able to completely close these gaps. Intervention to improve the academic achievement of poorer students, and hence their likelihood of applying and succeeding in entering HE—and ultimately within and beyond HE—needs to come far earlier in the system. This is not, of course, to say that universities should not play a major role in this endeavour, but it is important that we articulate what that role might be. Even if universities and schools work together to try and raise the achievement of poor children as they progress through the education system, this will take time; and, in the meantime, there already exists a more immediate potential solution, namely the contextualised admissions to which we referred earlier. There is a pressing need for both evidence and debate on the systematic and transparent use of contextualised admissions as a means to widen participation and improve fair access and this is precisely what Boliver, Gorard and Siddiqui provide in their fascinating paper, which summarises what universities are doing in terms of contextualised admissions and provides guidance on what indicators universities should be basing contextualisation upon, along with insight into the performance of students who have been contextually identified within higher education.