"The Governor View" - Access and Participation

Governing boards across England are in the process of signing off Access and Participation Plans (APPs) that are the most comprehensive ever produced, laying out in granular detail the risks to equality of opportunity, activities to mitigate them, how success will be measured, and the resources to be invested in each area.

They come on the back of a mixed picture on widening access in recent years, depending on what measure is used. UCAS figures in August showed that the number of places accepted by UK 18-year-olds from the low participation neighbourhoods rose by 7 per cent on the previous year. However, Department for Education data shows that the proportion of students eligible for free school meals progressing to university in 2022-23 was 29 per cent, compared with 29.2 per cent the year before – the first time the rate has fallen since measurements began in 2005-06.

While still far higher than the 20 per cent in this category who went to university in 2011-12, the figures show that there remains work to be done on access, and on ensuring equitable outcomes for undergraduates once they are at university. 

A recent speech by John Blake, director for fair access and participation at the Office for Students (OfS), to a Universities UK conference emphasised a number of priority areas for the sector.

Robust evaluation of access and participation interventions was one of them. Institutions were asked to avoid a reliance on students’ views as the primary evidence for assessing impact. The point was made that without a clear explanation as to why things are getting better, it is impossible for universities and colleges to scale or replicate impact. 

Good evaluation is also one of the tools that can help governors assess whether key performance indicators in this area are moving in the right direction. 

“There is quite a lot of work going on in access and participation and the plans are trying to bring that all together,” said a board member from a new university in London. “What is clear is that there is no one single solution. There are challenges with different student groups and the context has to be taken into account in any change intervention and in any evaluation.”

One governance and widening participation (WP) expert was reassured that there seemed to be an indication in the speech that a good evaluation showing that an activity was not effective was better than poor evidence of a seemingly successful approach.

“OfS seems to be making the point that it is interested in standards of evidence rather than evidence which is weak but is trying to claim that progress is being made,” he said. “I think it’s a recognition that there is no silver bullet and you’re not going to be penalised if you do something well and it doesn’t work.”

Separating out how much is to be spent on each WP activity, including on evaluation – which is part of the new APP framework - ensures that governors are better able to gauge costs and benefits.

“When funds are so stretched and there are conversations internally about being cash strapped, you can point to those commitments and the fact that the OfS is monitoring them,” said the governance expert. “And without an evaluation plan it is very hard to assess if these activities are effective over a 4- or 5-year period.”

One board member questioned whether governors were sufficiently aware of the strength of different forms of evaluation and suggested that training in this area could be useful, not just for WP but for other data-rich areas of responsibility. 

“In education, it’s difficult to apply scientific methods, such as randomised control trials” he said. “Training or induction in statistics and social research methods, what causal evidence looks like and other ways of doing evaluation, could help here.” 

Institutions in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, have different regulators and APPs are not a feature, although of course access and participation are still priorities. 

New figures from the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) show that in 2022-23, 16.3 per cent of Scottish-domiciled entrants to full-time first-degree courses were from the 20 per cent most deprived areas, down slightly from 16.5 per cent in 2021-22. 

The next interim target from the Scottish Commission on Widening Access (COWA) is 18 per cent for this metric by 2026. All except three universities are above the 2021 interim target which stipulates that by 2021, students from the 20 per cent most deprived backgrounds should represent at least 10 per cent of full-time first-degree entrants to every individual university in Scotland.

One governor at a Scottish university said that while widening participation (WP) was seen as important and viewed as a laudable activity, the level of knowledge and understanding of WP issues across boards generally was questionable.

“From board conversations at my own institution, I’m not sure everyone understands the various WP flags, for instance,” she said. “Also, what we don’t see at a governor level is a geographic idea of where we are getting our WP candidates from and who has come through the various supported pathways. And there doesn’t seem to be much information on free school meals, which would give us a more accurate picture.”

The kind of detail contained in APPs would make effective oversight much more meaningful, she said. 

“If you really want to support WP it takes money for outreach, mentoring schemes, additional support and management of it all,” she said. “But I’ve never seen at governor level any kind of breakdown of activities and the costs associated with it.”

Giving governors a clear view of access and participation endeavours is achieved at one institution in the south of England though an EDI education committee with a governor representative, an approach which could work elsewhere. 

“It means the board has a line of sight from the operational to the strategic, and for managers working in this area, it makes them feel that governors are talking it seriously,” a governor at the institution said. 

A second priority outlined in John Blake’s speech is partnerships, not just with schools, colleges and charities but with other HE institutions, to make the pursuit of access and participation goals more widespread, effective and efficient, and to help address big regional inequalities in access.

The director cited the strong evidence that the current Uni Connect network of 29 partnerships represents good value for money and indicated a commitment to create new regional partnership structures, for which the OfS is trying to secure DfE funding. 

Governors welcomed the clear emphasis on collaboration and pointed to evidence of its success in the past. 

“The principle of partnership and learning from other organisations is brilliant and why wouldn’t you want to do it,” said the governor of a new institution. “Aim Higher was created under the Blair government and there was a lot of funding to support initiatives which resulted in an expansion of participation.”

However, governors want to see current networks built upon rather than a time-consuming and costly reinvention of the wheel. 

“There are already partnership models operating in various locations, such as London Higher and the Northern Powerhouse”, said one board member in London. “Let’s see what is working already locally and maybe extend and add new focus rather than creating from scratch. We need to use the capacity that is already in the system and maximise that effort and energy.”

If the proposed new partnership structures have responsibility for overseeing APPs, as the speech indicated with a reference to “moving to a system of cohort renewal for APPs”, the question of who will have ultimate responsibility for risk and progress is a sensitive one.

“At the moment, governing boards do [have responsibility], but if partnerships have final sign offs, that makes the line of responsibility less clear” said a governance expert. “If that is the push, who owns and shares the risk? That will be quite complex if we are working towards a world where we are judged on regional targets and priorities.”

The third priority for the OfS is early intervention. New APPs already show a strong emphasis on working with schools, with a number of initiatives at primary level.

For some small specialist institutions in the creative arts sector, this focus has never been more important. A recent Sutton Trust report exploring equalities in access to creative education shows that young people from working-class backgrounds are significantly less likely than their middle-class peers to secure places on high quality creative courses and to go on to work in the creative industries.

“Work with younger pupils requires long-term investment that will not see outcomes until the medium-to-longer term, but we consider this early intervention work to be critical to building success and technical skills down the pipeline and changing culture and awareness,” said the governor of a small, specialist institution in London.

This category of access and participation activity is expensive and demands for more of it come at a time when university coffers are bare, a situation acknowledged by John Blake. 

As one governor points out, the recent rise in tuition fees in England has been “wiped out” by the rise in employer national insurance contributions.

This is felt nowhere more acutely than in Scotland, where universities hope the Budget announcement next month will deliver a rise in teaching grant funding for Scottish students.

“We are not expecting much in the budget because past history has shown we shouldn’t,” said a council member at a university north of the border. “The sense is that international students are going to save us, and we will get a bit more for English students. But within that it feels like Scottish students are not prized as much, which isn’t great for WP.”

The financial crisis means that universities with large numbers of WP students are effectively worse off because of the extra investment needed to support the learning and wellbeing of diverse groups of students to enable them to achieve the kind of good and comparable outcomes that the OfS’s B3 conditions demand.

One governor at an English university where three quarters of students are from lower socio-economic backgrounds says her institution is facing a deficit budget for the first time in 20 years.  

“With the national insurance increase and challenges in international recruitment, we won’t be any better off,” she said. “Money is still tight and working with schools and supporting students eats up resources. My sense is that we will carry on and won’t be making cuts, but we don’t have the resources to expand this work. Given the financial pressures, some of the OfS’s expectations on access and participation work are unrealistic, even for universities that have access in their DNA.”

Governors will be hoping that John Blake’s assurance that he is “particularly alert to questions about how the commitments entered into in the renewed APPs will be sustained in the current moment of adversity English higher education finds itself in”, will translate into an appropriate level of support for widening access activity.