Inequality in access to higher education by social background is a global phenomenon, but the level of attention given to this inequality in England is quite rare. Looking at widening access in a global context allows us to see whether approaches to addressing the challenge in other countries could inform what we do in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. More...

The higher education sector plans to spend £833 million in steady state under their 2017/18 Access Agreements. The Office for Fair Access (OFFA) is encouraging universities to transfer this spend from student bursaries to activities. OFFA is also celebrating the sector’s increasing professionalism, embracing targeted interventions and increasing research and evaluation. More...

Recent governments have put their weight behind a variety of policies to improve access to higher education for school-leavers from disadvantaged backgrounds. The removal of student number controls, increased availability of bursaries and support, and targeted information campaigns mean these students are now more likely to enter higher education in England than ever before. More...

Data, it turns out, are the weakest link, and much of the meaningful information available has to be drawn from multiple sector organisations. In order to define widening access and to ensure any actions to make access to education more equitable and fairer have impact, CoWA made robust recommendations about tracking learners from early years and about how data is collected, shared, analysed and published. The Commission’s final report is clear, concise and worth reading. More...

In Wales, it is also a matter of marrying equity with excellence, and of engaging with our traditions in order to break predestined privileges and deliver better access to the professions, to academia and to individual and national prosperity. More...

According to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, ‘capital’ is not just an economic concept. He also saw an individual’s knowledge and tastes as a form of cultural capital, which is ‘institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications’. Bourdieu believed different levels of access to various forms of capital are the root causes of social inequality, something perhaps magnified in higher education. More...

In research just published in the journal Fiscal Studies, we examine teaching at UK universities in more detail than any study since the 1963 Robbins Report. We compared the teaching of Economics, History and Physics across 67 universities. More...

I’m feeling conflicted. Obviously this article is being published after internal consultation at Kingston University, but I am nevertheless aware that I’m in danger of revealing a significant Kingston USP, and one that correlates with a marked reduction in our institutional drop-out rate over the past two years; a big thing in today’s highly competitive higher education market. More...