11 April 2008
The government is redoubling its efforts to get more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into higher education. But there are serious obstacles in the way of hitting its 50% target.
Getting more working class and disadvantaged students into higher education is one of the government's top priorities. Ministers are committed to achieving a 50% participation rate for young adults wishing to go to university. But, as Universities Secretary John Denham admitted this week, more 'confidence-building' measures are needed to reassure the public that the higher education admission system is 'open and accountable'.
Speaking at the annual conference of the Higher Education Funding Council for England on April 8, Denham announced major new powers to scrutinise universities' admissions procedures. Along with a range of other measures – including a new university mentoring scheme for school students – this is meant to beef up the drive to broaden higher education access.
But, despite spending almost £2bn on widening participation in England alone between 1997 and 2006, this particular target, set almost a decade ago, is proving a hard nut to crack. A hefty slice of this funding has been spent on helping students to complete their courses, but to little apparent effect.
People from the lower socioeconomic groups – skilled manual, semi-skilled and unskilled – are severely under-represented in higher education. Although half of the UK population are in one or other of these categories, fewer than a third of undergraduates are. In 1997/98, the first year this was consistently measured, the proportion was just 26%. Five years later, it was exactly the same.
In 2002/03, the proportion jumped to 29.2%. However, this rise might have been due to the introduction in that year of a new classification of socioeconomic groups. By 2005/06 – the most recent year for which data are currently available – the proportion had edged up to 29.8%. But the figures need to be treated with caution, since the social class of around one in four young full-time undergraduates is unknown.
Throughout this period, the government was pumping money into the sector to help widen participation. When Labour came to power in 1997, nothing was specifically spent on this apart from £22m for access funds to help students in financial hardship.
Two years later, Hefce allocated £20m funding to institutions for teaching 'to recognise the extra costs associated with recruiting and supporting students from disadvantaged backgrounds currently under-represented in higher education'.
Soon after the government set the target for England, Scotland – with historically higher participation levels – announced it had already met the 50% target. Northern Ireland, too, is close to the 50% mark, with traditionally higher levels of working-class participation than the rest of the UK. In Wales, targets have been more focused on increasing take-up from the most deprived areas.
By 2003/04, Hefce's £20m had shot up to £265m. The lion's share of this was for improving retention, that is, providing learning support for students from a non-traditional higher education background – such as white working-class males and Bangladeshi women – to help them continue their courses. But almost £50m was for widening access, to support outreach and recruitment activities by institutions to encourage young people to apply to university. There was funding, too, to enable disabled people to study.
In all, between 1997/98 and 2007/08, £2.9bn was spent on widening participation, access funds and the Aimhigher programme (and its predecessors). Aimhigher was set up to encourage under-represented learners to enter higher education, using sub-regional partnerships of universities, schools, further education colleges and work-based learning providers. Next year's funding for HE institutions and the next three years of money for Aimhigher will bring Labour's total spending on widening participation to almost £3.5bn. In Scotland, in 2007/08, funding for widening access and disabled students rose to over £12m; in Wales, it amounted to more than £6m.
But none of this seems to have done much to resolve the problem of high dropout rates. A February report from the Commons Public Accounts Committee was critical of universities' record on retention. It said: 'To help improve retention and participation, over the past five years universities have received around £800m in funding for recruiting the types of students who are likely to need more support to complete their studies. Retention rates have not improved, though participation in higher education has been increased.'
In response, Hefce chief executive David Eastwood said: 'The UK is justly proud of its record in achieving higher estimated graduation rates than most other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.' But he acknowledged that there was 'a disparity of performance across the sector' and 'no cause for complacency'.
While spending millions on widening participation, Labour was also establishing a student finance and support regime in the UK that arguably undermined its goal to bring under-represented groups into higher education. In 1998, it introduced means-tested up-front tuition fees of £1,000 for full-time undergraduate students (part-timers were already paying fees). The following year, it abolished the last vestiges of the maintenance grant, replacing it fully with a loans system.
Research carried out in 2002 across the UK found that while the majority of students surveyed took a 'pragmatic view of debt', the groups most tolerant of it were younger students, white students and those from the highest social class.
Conversely, 'the groups more likely to be worried about debts building up, and thinking that financial difficulties had negatively affected how well they did at university, were: older students; single parent students; those from lower social classes; and those who worked during term-time.'
In Scotland, upfront private contributions to tuition fees were charged only in 1998/99 and 1999/2000, before being replaced with a graduate endowment payment of £2,000 for Scottish-domiciled students. The funds from this were then recycled into non-repayable bursaries for poor students. Last month, the Scottish Parliament voted to scrap the endowment.
Wales introduced means-tested Assembly Learning Grants in 2002. England, acknowledging that its student support system wasn't working, followed suit with means-tested maintenance grants from 2004. Northern Ireland also offers these, though they are higher than England's.
Although grants are back, the biggest change to student finance was in 2006, when variable top-up fees were introduced in England and Northern Ireland for full-time undergraduates, taking the standard fee up to a maximum of £3,000. Where students were charged the full amount, universities had to provide a minimum bursary of £300 to those on a full grant, with non-means-tested fee loans available. In practice, many institutions provide much higher bursaries than the minimum. Wales introduced variable fees in 2007, with a non-repayable, non-means-tested grant covering the tuition fee for students from Wales studying in Wales, and a national – rather than institutionally variable – bursary scheme.
Has the government's fees-and-loans regime – particularly top-ups – undermined widening participation? The jury is still out. Figures from the UK higher education applications body, Ucas, have brought some cheer to the government. But there is concern that accepted applications from some disadvantaged groups have not returned to their pre-top-up fees level.
The new student finance regime is certainly having teething troubles. Research carried out in 2006/07 for the Sutton Trust, an independent organisation that campaigns against educational inequality, found that many English school and college students from poor backgrounds were being put off university because of fear of debt and very few of them knew about bursaries or maintenance grants on offer. The researchers also found that the complexity of the student finance system, with variable fees, variable bursaries, means-tested grants and loans, discouraged good decision-making among prospective students.
The Office for Fair Access, a public body set up to monitor the top-up fee system, reported that around 12,000 students on full state support failed to collect their bursaries in 2006/07.
The government's next effort to break the widening participation logjam is an investigation led by University of Exeter vice-chancellor Steve Smith into best practice in building links between schools and universities. Later this month, the Sutton Trust will be reporting to the investigation on ways to improve social access, with a particular focus on the early secondary years.
Lee Elliot Major, research director at the trust, says: 'One of the themes coming out of the research is that if you are going to make big inroads into the inequalities in higher education admissions, you are going to have to intervene much earlier in the school system, in the 11 to 14 age range.' The university heads' organisation, Universities UK, will also be contributing a report.
After a decade of heavy spending and little or no progress on increasing the social mix in higher education, the investigation is unlikely to find any quick fixes. John Denham spoke in January of the need to make higher education available to all with the potential to benefit from it. 'That is not the case at the moment,' he said.
Gordon Marshall, the vice-chancellor of the University of Reading, underlined this message this month when he said: 'Instead of sending universities modest sums of money and asking them to reverse class inequalities in education very late in the process, it might be better to spend that money earlier and in ways that might prevent these inequalities emerging in quite such extreme forms.' This is a theme that has been picked up on in Denham's speech to Hefce.
Next year, the government is to review top-up fees. A report on future options for the fees, published by the independent Higher Education Policy Institute on April 3, expressed concern that higher fees without additional public funding for student support could particularly hit students from lower-income households. If fees are increased, as many universities want, then despite bursaries and means-tested grants – and all the efforts to improve fairness and transparency – it could well prove another barrier to improving social equality in UK education.
Stephen Court is senior research officer at the University and College Union
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