Disadvantaged students offered year’s free tuition at Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE University is to offer disadvantaged students a year of free tuition after their A-levels to give them a “leg up” on the academic ladder.

The “Transitional Year” programme will be for bright but poor pupils who are offered a place to study at Cambridge but fail to achieve A-level grades to meet their offer.

Prof Sir Stephen Toope, the university’s vice-chancellor, said his message for these students was: “‘Here’s an opportunity for you to come to Cambridge for a period of time for free.’

“We are not going to ask them to pay. We are working with philanthropists to fund this programme, so that we have access to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to come here for that extra year. We are aware of the pressure that that would place on them. And we give them the opportunity to really just get a leg up to work with some of our academics to make sure that if they are finally admitted to Cambridge they are really ready for the programme.”

Cambridge and other elite universities are under pressure to widen access and make sure students from disadvantaged backgrounds are not deterred from applying.

Sir Michael Barber, chairman of the Office for Students, has said that universities that fail to improve diversity will have their tuition fees slashed by a third by the regulator.

He said that he is “interested in results, not just plans”, adding that if a university does not “keep its promises” to improve diversity he would reduce the tuition fees cap from £9,000 to £6,000.

Prof Toope said the programme will not automatically qualify the selected students for Cambridge, but would “pretty much guarantee they will be able to go to a top university”.

Cambridge admissions tutors already take into account a student’s socio-economic background when making offers.

Students are assigned a “contextual flag” based on a number of factors, including their household income, family stability and quality of schooling.

Now this information will also be used as eligibility criteria for the new Transition Year programme, which the vice-chancellor announced this week.

“Cambridge can’t be an excellent university if it is not open to talent wherever that talent is found, all across the UK from every ethnicity and indeed from around the world,” Prof Toope told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Prof Toope also announced a £500million fundraising drive to pay for the Transition Year programme, as well as scholarships, bursaries and mental health provision.

The fully-funded foundation scheme follows a similar initiative at Oxford University’s Lady Margaret Hall.