UK: Widening participation debate heats up

The debate on widening participation in Britain's universities heated up last week with the publication of a report on special schemes to encourage pupils from poorer backgrounds to enter higher education, and inflammatory remarks by the Chancellor of Oxford University. Lord (Chris) Patten told a conference of independent school heads that his university should not be treated "like a social security office" to help disadvantaged pupils from state schools.

Compact Schemes in Higher Education by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce), shows that 51 or nearly half of the country's higher education institutions are offering some form of "compact" with their local communities. The council says the compacts are a means of establishing a closer working relationship and understanding between institutions, schools and colleges, and also of widening participation in targeted communities.

The report follows Education Secretary John Denham's recent announcement that nine selective universities, including Birmingham, Bristol and Kings College London, were stepping up measures to widen participation.

It defines compacts as a set of arrangements between higher education institutions, schools and colleges that provide special conditions or consideration for entry into the university.

The research found that most compacts made students the standard offer of a place, around a third of the schemes made flexible offers, some helped with applications, while others provided "taster days", master classes, summer schools, credit for volunteering, or guidance and support sessions.

The 51 institutions enrol a little over half the total undergraduate population. Compacts are therefore significant but vary hugely in scope, says the report. Each compact averages around 348 students and the schemes generate about 248 applications and 105 entrants each.

"To put this in perspective, around 318,000 people enter full-time undergraduate higher education in England each year," the report states. "Some schemes, particularly those involving younger learners where the principal purpose is to raise aspirations and change expectations, can be quite extensive. Compacts of all kinds probably involve some 1,700 schools and colleges, and between 40,000 and 60,000 learners."

Widening participation has been on the Labour government's agenda for many years and ministers have encouraged universities to admit students from families where there is no tradition of higher education in an attempt to get half of 18 to 30-year-olds into higher education. This policy has led to accusations of lowering standards, political correctness and social engineering.

To counter this, Denham set out measures for a "transparent and open admissions process" in his speech to Hefce's annual conference last April. He asked for the council's help to work with universities to publish their admissions policies.

Writing in The Guardian last week, Kevin Whitston, head of widening participation at Hefce, said: "Taking account of the learner's context can lead to a heated debate but it does not need to if we ask the right questions about evidence...For the institutions and applicants alike, the winning formula for fair admissions is evidence-based decisions about individuals where decision-makers look at all the evidence available to them."

However, the debate over access was refuelled last week by Patten who told the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference in London the government was infringing universities' independence and treating them like social security offices instead of academic institutions in its drive to improve education and social mobility.

Patten, a former Conservative minister and Governor of Hong Kong, said: "The sense that many universities have is that they are being asked to make up for the deficiencies of secondary education. If this were the aim, it would be a fool's mission."

He said there was no chance of Oxford meeting government targets for increasing the proportion of state pupils it admits until state schools caught up with private schools in A-level results. Patten pointed out that OECD research showed the gap in performance between Britain's private and state schools was "the widest in the Western world".

Oxford takes 53% of its students from state schools that educate 93% of students. The government wants the percentage to increase to 62% by the end of the decade.

Compact schemes in higher education institutions