- Concluding paper from UPP Foundation’s inquiry calls for ambitious new targets for access to higher education, which includes at least 50% participation for 18-19 year olds from all regions.
- The inquiry also calls for maintenance grants for the worst-off students, and reinvestment of the proposed international student fee levy into HE cold spots.
- Report highlights enduring geographical and socioeconomic inequalities that exist within widening participation, as well as undesirable changes to the student experience owing to the cost of learning.
- Alongside getting into university, the report advocates a greater focus on measures that help students at university to ‘get on’, and after graduation to ‘get out’ successfully.
Today the UPP Foundation publishes a recommendations paper that concludes its four-part inquiry into widening participation in 2025.
The report makes six recommendations to launch an ambitious agenda and reform:
- A ‘triple lock’ widening participation target for tertiary and higher education, incorporating i) a gap of no more than 10 percentage points between the highest and lowest regional HE participation rates; plus ii) a 50% floor for progression to HE at 18-19 across all regions; and iii) a target for 70% of the whole English population to have studied at Level 4 or above by the age of 25.
- A broader, more flexible Access and Participation Plan structure, alongside stronger rhetoric and guidance, both to clarify how the APP system can support more innovative spending and to reinforce the point that APPs can and should be spent on all three stages of the widening participation cycle (getting in, getting on and getting out), and activity pre-18.
- Recognising that this will come at a cost, and building on the inquiry’s findings which show that the cost of learning crisis is impacting both residential and commuter students alike, financial support for students should be increased: the real terms value of the maximum student maintenance should be restored to 2021 levels by the end of the decade, and government should commit to a reinstated maintenance grant on top of the existing maximum maintenance loan settlement (for students who have been eligible for FSM in the last six years, also known as ever-6 FSM status).
- A proportion of the proposed international student fee levy, if introduced, should be ringfenced to support the expanded APP regime, prioritising disadvantaged students from cold spots.
- The OfS B3 metric on positive student outcomes should be reconfigured to make employability a larger part of the university accountability system. Specifically, this should include a metric showing graduate destinations after three years or five years, as recommended by the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
- Employers should play a larger role in the design and outputs of university study. Flexible APP funding, and senior management time, spent on local labour market work can and should be considered widening participation work and recognised as such.
The paper takes as its starting-point three issues that have characterised the findings from across the rest of the project: first, the ongoing, significant variation in application rates to undergraduate higher education by 17-18 year olds from across England, which cannot fully be explained by attainment at 17; second, the insufficiency of financial support for residential and commuter students, especially those from cold spots, low-participation regions or disadvantaged backgrounds; and third, the variation in positive outcomes between institutions, and between different groups of students within an institution.
The recommendations are intended to spark a debate across the sector and within government in order to move towards a new vision for widening participation in higher education.
Richard Brabner, Executive Chair of the UPP Foundation, said: “The UPP Foundation’s inquiry into widening participation set out to fill in the gaps around access to higher education that the government had left in its opportunity mission, and to put forward a vision for how that gap might be filled. In this final paper, we have set out a series of ambitious but achievable targets for where government and the sector can go next on widening participation. The sector is facing a new reality; this paper sets out the new mission through which it can tackle it.”
