Developed to change the lives of young people in some of the most disadvantaged areas of England, the National Collaborative Outreach Programme is nine months old. So what does success look like for the programme and how have things been going? The National Collaborative Outreach Programme (NCOP) is an ambitious £60 million-a-year programme that aims to increase the number of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds in higher education. Read More

The Department for Education has today (8 September 2017) announced the appointment of Chris Millward as the first Director for Fair Access and Participation of the Office for Students (OfS). The OfS is a new public body, established by the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. Once fully operational in April 2018 the OFS - which will replace the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) - will regulate the higher education sector and place stud...

The cost of going to university has been widely debated and discussed in recent months. It’s now clear that the concerns raised by students, graduates and their families need to be addressed. At the same time, the debate needs to be grounded in evidence – we need to understand what the issues really are, and what is the best way forward in resolving them. The current undergraduate funding system in England is not broken, and the evidence supports this. It allows all those who are qualified and w...

Universities have just two more years to double their proportion of disadvantaged students. They’re making progress, especially on widening access. But Les Ebdon, director of the Office for Fair Access, thinks the target is unlikely to be met at the current rate. In particular, he is calling upon universities to do more to tailor their efforts towards specific groups. Read More

  England’s leading universities have made “incredibly slow” progress in widening access to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, despite spending hundreds of millions of pounds on schemes designed to widen access to their undergraduate courses. A new report by the independent thinktank Reform ranks 29 “high-tariff” universities for their progress in accepting disadvantaged students. It finds that only the best-performing university, the London School of Economics (LSE), managed to in...

More than 20,000 pupils left their school’s sixth forms before completing their A-level courses, new analysis shows, after revelations that some schools have systematically pushed pupils out for failing to achieve top marks. About 13% of the 160,000 pupils taking at least three AS-levels at state schools nationally did not go on to complete year 13, equivalent to 20,800 pupils, according to analysis by Education Datalab. Read More

A potential shortage of school places looms ahead in secondary schools in England, councils are warning.The Local Government Association says schools will be thousands of places short over the next few years as a population bulge moves up from primary. It says schools in 12 councils will be over capacity by 2018, rising to nearly half of councils within five years. But the Department for Education attacked the figures as "thoroughly misleading".This is the sixth year in a row that town hall bos...

Teenage girls are now more than a third more likely to go to university than boys, according to new figures, as the gap between the sexes reaches record levels. In total, upwards of 30,000 more women than men are set to start degree courses this autumn, official Ucas data shows. The difference is the largest ever recorded by the university admissions service by this point in the year. The figures show around 6,600 fewer students have been places on courses this year, compared with the same...

This year’s GCSE results are notable for the confusion that has surrounded the introduction of the new 9-1 grading system. Pupils and teachers are unsure about the equivalence of numerical and letter grades, as are employers, who, according to some of the big business lobby groups, will now be faced with candidates holding a mixture of both. There have also been mixed messages from universities, with reports that different institutions are planning on taking different approaches as to whether a ...

The proportion of pupils achieving good GCSE passes in England has fallen this year, amid a blizzard of changes in exams and gradings, including a new nine-point scale in the key subjects of English and maths. There were weaker results in history, maths and geography than last year, but the picture was complicated by changing patterns of entries and some substantial increases in numbers taking the tests as schools adjusted to the new process. Read More