Access to Britain’s top universities is far from fair

Research suggests that access to the United Kingdom's top universities is far from fair for students from state schools and ethnic minorities, even when the figures are screened for subjects studied at A-level

Hard Evidence: why aren’t there more black British students at elite universities?

Young people from black British backgrounds are more likely to go to university than their white British peers, but they are much less likely to attend the UK’s most selective universities. As the Independent Commission on Social Mobility pointed out: “There are more young men from black backgrounds in prison in the UK than there are UK-domiciled undergraduate black male students attending Russell Group institutions.

Enhancement of yield by increasing ovule initiation in Arabidopsis thaliana

Food security is a growing risk with the exponentially increasing population. Current methods of increasing crop output are causing serious damage to valuable habitats. One potential solution to this problem is to increase the yield of crops. Arabidopsis thaliana, the model organism for plants,is a member of the Brassicaceae family of plants; this is an economically important group of plants as it contains many crop plants, such as the cabbage. Using a molecular biology approach, I investigated the potential of using a genetic mutantresistant to a plant growth factor (BZR1-1D)as an alternative to the wildtype (Col-0), the type which appears most commonly in nature, of A.thalianato produce more seeds as a way of increasing yield. This has been done by growing wildtype and BZR1-1D mutant lines and harvesting the siliques (fruiting bodies which contain the seeds). I measured the length of the silique and counted the number of seeds in each and found that themutant (BZR1) has a higher ave

Private providers of higher education in the UK: mapping the terrain

Working Paper 47, authored by Dr Stephen Hunt and Professor Vikki Boliver, reports on the findings of a web-based survey of private providers of higher education operating in the UK in 2017. The findings indicate that there as some 813 private providers in operation in the UK – a significant increase on the 732 and 674 recorded in 2014 and 2011 respectively. However, there appears to be a degree of volatility in the private provider sector: 50 per cent (363) of private providers identified by prior research conducted in 2014 had ceased to operate, at least as HE providers, three years later. Of these, 165 were listed as dissolved at Companies House, 70 had simply vanished without trace, and a further 128 were still in operation but no longer providing courses at HE level, or possibly never had. The vast majority of private providers, 88 per cent, operate exclusively in England. Private providers range from a few large-scale colleges and private universities with 1000+ enrolled students to small scale providers offering courses in addition to their principle business. The majority of private providers, some 64 per cent, are for-profit enterprises. For-profit private providers tend to be younger than not-for-profit private providers, and more vulnerable to market exit. For-profit enterprises accounted for 61 per cent of all private providers identified in 2014 but 90 per cent of all those providers found to have closed down between 2014 and 2017. Many providers are small scale, concentrating on sub-degree or postgraduate qualification across a narrow band of subjects – often characterised as being popular but with low overheads. This means private providers are as likely to complete amongst themselves as with the public sector. The paper also details the qualifications offered by private providers of higher education; the subject specialisations; levels of innovation in delivery, such as accelerated courses; the number and characteristics of students; and the quality of inspections on the providers

Performance-based university funding and the drive towards ‘institutional meritocracy’ in Italy

Many countries, including Italy, are increasingly managing their public higher education systems in accordance with the New Public Management principle that private-sector management practices improve efficiency and quality. A key mechanism has been the introduction of performance-based funding systems designed to reward ‘high-performing’ institutions and incentivise ‘lesser-performing’ institutions to improve. Instead of improving efficiency and quality across the board, however, we argue that performance-based funding systems naturalise longstanding structurally determined inequalities between institutions by recasting national higher education systems as competitive institutional meritocracies in which institutional inequalities are redefined as objective indicators of intrinsic ‘merit’ or worth. We illustrate how performance-based university funding systems naturalise pre-existing inequalities between universities drawing on the case of Italy, a country characterised by longstanding inequalities between its northern and southern regions which demonstrably impact on the apparent ‘performance’ of universities. The concept of institutional meritocracy captures the illusory nature of this performance game

Does grammar school attendance increase the likelihood of attending a prestigious UK university?

In 2018 the UK government launched a £50 million scheme to fund the expansion of existing grammar schools provided that they increase efforts to attract more pupils from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. This initiative assumed that grammar school attendance boosts the educational attainment and the higher education progression rates of pupils judged to be of high ability. It is already well established that grammar school pupils' higher average levels of educational attainment are due largely to their academic and social selectivity. The evidence in relation to higher education enrolment conditional on educational attainment, however, is more mixed. This paper sets out to update and improve on previous studies of the impact of grammar school attendance on higher education enrolment. Our analysis of data from the Next Steps longitudinal survey linked to National Pupil Database records finds that propensities to enrol in higher education generally, and at prestigious Russell Group universities specifically, are no better for grammar school pupils than for non-selective state school pupils with the same level of attainment at GCSE and A-level. This nil effect of grammar school attendance on progression to higher education net of the effects of educational attainment holds regardless of pupils' socioeconomic background, suggesting that grammar schools are no better than non-selective state schools as facilitators of upward social mobility

Organisational Identity as a Barrier to Widening Access in Scottish Universities

Widening access policy has historically focused on tackling the socioeconomic barriers to university access faced by prospective students from under-represented groups, but increasingly policy makers are seeking to also address the barriers to wider access posed by undergraduate admissions policies. In this vein, the Scottish Government has recently called upon universities to set separate academic entry requirements for socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants which recognise that “the school attainment of disadvantaged learners often does not reflect their full potential” and which better reflect the minimum needed to succeed in higher education. In this paper, we draw on in-depth interviews with admissions personnel at eighteen Scottish universities to explore the scope for more progressive admissions policies of this kind in light of universities’ identities as organisations and in light of corresponding organisational strategies for position-taking in global and national higher education fields. We present a theoretical model and an empirical illustration of three hierarchically-ordered ideal types of organisational identity—globally competitive, nationally selective, and locally transformative—and show that the more dominant of these tend to constrain the development of more progressive admissions policies. This is because globally competitive and, to a lesser extent, nationally selective organisational identities are understood to require admission of the ‘brightest and best’, conceptualised as those with the highest levels of prior academic attainment who can be expected to succeed at university and beyond as a matter of course. We conclude that universities must recognise and redress the implicitly exclusionary nature of their organisational identities if genuine progress on widening access is to be made

Reliability of Longitudinal Social Surveys of Access to Higher Education: The Case of Next Steps in England

Longitudinal social surveys are widely used to understand which factors enable or constrain access to higher education. One such data resource is the Next Steps survey comprising an initial sample of 16,122 pupils aged 13–14 attending English state and private schools in 2004, with follow up annually to age 19–20 and a further survey at age 25. The Next Steps data is a potentially rich resource for studying inequalities of access to higher education. It contains a wealth of information about pupils’ social background characteristics—including household income, parental education, parental social class, housing tenure and family composition—as well as longitudinal data on aspirations, choices and outcomes in relation to education. However, as with many longitudinal social surveys, Next Steps suffers from a substantial amount of missing data due to item non-response and sample attrition which may seriously compromise the reliability of research findings. Helpfully, Next Steps data has been linked with more robust administrative data from the National Pupil Database (NPD), which contains a more limited range of social background variables, but has comparatively little in the way of missing data due to item non-response or attrition. We analyse these linked datasets to assess the implications of missing data for the reliability of Next Steps. We show that item non-response in Next Steps biases the apparent socioeconomic composition of the Next Steps sample upwards, and that this bias is exacerbated by sample attrition since Next Steps participants from less advantaged social backgrounds are more likely to drop out of the study. Moreover, by the time it is possible to measure access to higher education, the socioeconomic background variables in Next Steps are shown to have very little explanatory power after controlling for the social background and educational attainment variables contained in the NPD. Given these findings, we argue that longitudinal social surveys with much missing data are only reliable sources of data on access to higher education if they can be linked effectively with more robust administrative data sources. This then raises the question—why not just use the more robust datasets