Australia can teach England how to reboot widening access

Nobody could accuse England’s Office for Students (OfS) of a lack of activity where access and participation is concerned. Since late 2021, the regulator has been attempting, at the behest of the government, to give this area of work a reboot, asking higher education providers to refocus their work with schools and colleges around raising attainment, produce summaries of their access and participation plans, amend these plans and, now, rewrite them altogether.

England’s current approach should be recognised as world-leading. The access and participation plans that institutions are required to draw up in exchange for access to student loans are virtually unrivalled in their rigour outside the UK, and the rewriting directive, announced last month, will reinforce their importance.

The directive asks higher education providers to look even closer at what the risks to “equality of opportunity” are in their own institutions. This means identifying specific gaps in access, degree attainment or progression to employment in different courses for particular groups of students.

Providers will have to show they have taken into account the risks identified by the OfS’ Equal Opportunities Risk Register (EORR), which maps out 12 risks to access, success and progression covering more than 40 different groups. The risks range from lack of knowledge of higher education to the impact of the pandemic; the groups include 18 different ethnic backgrounds and seven different socio-economic categories. This will drive providers to identify the variations in inequality in their institutions and develop more targeted, nuanced ways of addressing them.

It could be said that the EORR merely states what professionals working on the access agenda already know. However, the directive will make senior managers focus again on who enters and then succeeds in their institutions and who does not – including groups that have received too little attention in the past, such as lesbian, gay or bisexual students and those reporting mental health conditions.

This more student-centred, risk-based approach is also likely to result in improved support in some areas of risk – even if that is accompanied by a loss of support in other areas for students in the same groups with the same needs. All this has to be welcome.

However, by increasing the pressure on individual institutions, the OfS risks exacerbating the inward focus that discourages the kind of collaboration needed for real progress in equitable access and success.

Many of the groups that are the focus of access work, such as children in care, young carers and those in the Gypsy Romany Traveller community, are small and/or dispersed. It is therefore neither logical nor efficient for universities to work with them in isolation. They need to partner with each other and with specialist organisations that support such learners.

The Service Children’s Progression Alliance (SCiP Alliance) is an example. This UK-wide network of hubs supports the educational progression of children and young people from UK armed forces families, a group that numbers around 80,000 according to recent research, but averages just one per school. Local collaboration, with universities often sharing leadership with military charities and other specialist organisations, allows diverse partners to pool often limited resources to develop action plans that reflect the needs of local students and engage meaningfully and cost-effectively with such a dispersed cohort.

Another dispersed network of organisations that offer specialised support to learners is the national Uni-Connect programme. Funded by the OfS itself, this offers activities, advice and information on “the benefits and realities of going to university”. Despite the growing weight of evidence showing the impact of this programme and others that have preceded it, its future beyond this summer is in doubt. The new guidance does encourage providers to collaborate, but more to raise attainment for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds than anything else. Uni-Connect does more than this, providing vital information, advice and guidance across geographical areas and bringing together groups of schools and colleges, but mentions of Uni-Connect in the new guidance are absent.

Politicians truly committed to the access agenda could do a lot worse than to look to the other side of the world to see what is possible. On entering office in 2022, Australia’s new Labor government launched the Universities Accord – a comprehensive review of the country’s higher education system. The interim report, released last July, stated that the overall goal of the system must be “growth for skills through greater equity”, advocating for ambitious national participation targets for equity groups.

The OfS’ efforts to improve access and participation plans are undoubtedly laudable. However, if England is serious about access and participation then it too needs a new national strategy centred on addressing inequalities in who enters and succeeds in its higher education institutions. This is the real reboot that is required.

Graeme Atherton is director of the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON) at the University of West London. Philip Dent is director of the Service Children’s Progression Alliance at the University of Winchester.