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Towards a new mission for Widening Participation

During the spring and summer of 2025 the UPP Foundation is running a major inquiry into the future of widening participation.

The inquiry aims to support a new vision for widening participation with concrete recommendations to break down barriers to higher education and improve student outcomes.

Despite Tony Blair’s target of 50% of young people attending higher education being met in 2017, significant inequalities persist in who accesses university, how they experience it, and what they gain from it. The difference in progression rates to higher education between students eligible for free school meals and their peers has widened to 20.8% – the highest on record. Regionally, London’s higher education participation rate stands at 61.2%, compared to just 40.8% in the North East. Even for disadvantaged students who do make it to university, outcome gaps are widening rather than narrowing. The continuation gap between students from the most and least advantaged backgrounds reached 9.4 percentage points in 2021-22, up from 7.5 percentage points in 2016-17.

What we are going to do…

Our inquiry comes at a critical time as the government begins translating its Opportunity Mission into concrete policies which tackle these challenges.

The UPP Foundation inquiry will publish four reports and conclude the inquiry in July.

 

  • The second report will focus on regional “cold spots” – exploring why there has been persistent failure to raise HE participation in regions where significantly fewer young people attend university. For example, 27.1% of 18-year-olds in Houghton and Sunderland South – Bridget Phillipson’s parliamentary constituency – progressed to HE in 2024; 9.7 percentage points lower than the national entry rate. 71.6% of 18-year-olds in Battersea entered higher education in 2024 – the highest UK constituency – compared to just 11.1% in Barrow-in-Furness. This report will be based on in-depth qualitative research in a cold spot and published in May.

 

  • The third report will look at disparities in the student experience. This is a theme the UPP Foundation has long championed through our Student Futures Commission. We will examine how university experiences differ based on students’ living arrangements and economic backgrounds, with poorer students often receiving a secondary experience that contributes to lower continuation and completion rates. This report will be based on in-depth qualitative research in a university city and published in June.

 

  • The fourth and final report of the inquiry will bring all of the evidence we have gathered together and offer a set of concrete recommendations to the government and the sector in order to achieve the Opportunity Mission and develop a new mission for widening participation.

Download report

This first paper, launching the inquiry, sets out the key issues for access and widening participation  in 2025, exploring some of the progress made over the last twenty-five years, but also identifying some persistent gaps and issues that remain unresolved.

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