Good schools know how important it is for parents and carers to support their child’s education at home and want to involve them in discussions about careers and future plans. However, for parents, especially those with low educational attainment or poor levels of literacy and numeracy, can be reluctant or fearful of getting involved in discussions about higher education. Tackling this issue is not easy, but universities do have a role to play in helping schools. They could, for example, support...

Almost all young people say that their parents influenced their education and career choices, yet our latest research, published with Kings College London last week, reveals that many universities fail to plan their outreach activities around parents. Why might that be? We found that problems start early, many schools struggle to engage parents, yet in many cases, universities rely on schools in order to access parents. As one interviewee put it: “Teachers are always acting as the gatekeepers so...

University is life-changing for many people, not just in terms of their employment opportunities, but in their outlook and confidence. It certainly changed mine. However, there are some practices, such as unconditional offers, which are letting students down. The increase in unconditional offers has been swift and significant, with fewer than 3,000 recorded in 2013, rising to more than 50,000 in 2017. Ucas’ annual report identifies that the number of unconditional offers from selective universit...

The new higher education watchdog, the Office for Students (OfS), is urging universities to pay more attention to socio-economic and school background, rather than just A-level grades, when deciding to award a place to a student. It wants institutions to be more ambitious on what are known as “contextual admissions”, offering places to students who have the potential to study at the highest level, but may be at a disadvantage because of background and school. Most universities already use contex...

Universities across the UK are offering free tutoring for disadvantaged school children in order to improve diversity in higher education. 35 higher education institutions, including Leeds, Birmingham, Worcester and Hertfordshire universities, are using part their budget from widening participation to pay online tuition for GCSE and A-level students. Some A-level students will have received offers from universities already, and the extra tuition helps to ensure they make the grades. Universities...

The last 10 years have seen a growing emphasis on widening participation and access to higher education across the world. Yet there are so many significant changes taking place, affecting everything from international student mobility to recruitment trends to regional and global graduate employability that it is hard to predict with much accuracy what the future of higher education holds or to be sure that your institution is primed to be responsive. In the midst of all this confusion, universit...

It’s no secret that, in higher education, where you come from has a major impact on where you end up. There are wide gaps in access depending on which part of the country you come from, with young people from some areas still over twice as likely to enter higher education as those from the lowest participation neighbourhoods, and more than five times as likely to enter the universities with the highest entry requirements. Read More.

From today, students can see data on the average earnings by subject for each higher education provider on the Unistats website. This is the first time detailed subject level data has been made available publicly. This means that we are showing data for French specifically, for example, rather than grouping together earnings for all language subjects. Read More.

Colleges take chances on young people and adults every day to offer them opportunities to progress, writes Kirsti Lord. I was recently at an event for colleagues at universities working to widen access to higher education. It was inspiring to see hundreds of people committed to engaging those least likely to apply for university, coming together to share case studies, best practice and research on how to increase the number of first-generation scholars. Read More.

IntoUniversity started in a West London community that people across the world now know all too well for the worst of reasons: the Lancaster West Estate, home to Grenfell Tower. There can be few local communities in history that have been subject to so much national attention, or so many questions about the relationship between place, poverty and social mobility. Fifteen years before the fire, we launched IntoUniversity in response to the alarming number of young people from Lancaster West who w...