Poorer students win just 1 in 12 places at top unis
TOP universities recruit fewer than one in 12 undergraduates from the most deprived areas.
Only 8 per cent of Scottishbased entrants at the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow and St Andrews in 2015-16 were from the 20 per cent most deprived areas.
The percentage of Scottishbased entrants to higher education as a whole from the poorest parts of the country was 16.1 per cent, up only 0.1 per cent from 2014-15.
The fractional progress and low proportion of poorer students on the campuses of ancient institutions comes despite the SNP repeatedly pledging to crack down on elitism in universities.
Scottish Labour education spokesman Iain Gray said the figures showed a ‘failure from an SNP Government that promised to make education its priority’.
The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) figures also show that students from less affluent backgrounds are less likely to enter specialist institutions such as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow School of Art and SRUC (Scotland’s Rural College), making up only 11 per cent of their intake.
Newer institutions such as the universities of Dundee and Stirling had a rate of 12 per cent and at the Open University it was 14 per cent.
Fifteen per cent of students at the University of Abertay Dundee and Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, were from the poorest backgrounds.
Colleges fared best on the number of entrants from poorer backgrounds, with 23 per cent coming from the most deprived areas.
The Scottish Government’s Commission on Widening Access wants students from the 20 per cent most deprived backgrounds to represent 20 per cent of entrants to higher education by 2030.
Scottish Tory education spokesman Liz Smith said: ‘More work needs to be done in terms of widening access.
‘But that means the Scottish Government must address the crucial issue of funding the additional places required in order to ensure that other, well-qualified students are not squeezed out of the system.
‘The recent cuts to higher education funding which made Audit Scotland question the future susstances,
‘Make education its priority’
tainability of the higher education sector, should be a priority for this SNP Government.’
Vonnie Sandlan, president of the National Union of Students in Scotland, said: ‘These figures are hugely disappointing and reinforce how far we are from meeting the ambitions set by the Commission on Widening Access.
‘This clearly illustrates that work to secure a truly fair education system is not being shared by every institution – we continue to see the bulk of our widening access work being done by the same institutions, year on year.’
A University of Aberdeen spokesman said: ‘Our law school has already reduced entry requirements for students with special circum- including those from deprived backgrounds.’
A University of Edinburgh spokesman said: ‘We run outreach initiatives across Scotland and provide one of the UK’s most generous bursary packages to support students who face financial barriers.’
A spokesman for the University of Glasgow said it ‘runs extremely successful outreach programmes to ensure we recruit the most able and ambitious students, regardless of socio-economic background’.
The university said this was ‘reflected in the rise in the number of Scottish-based students from the 40 per cent most disadvantaged areas to more than 25 per cent of our undergraduate intake’.
A spokesman for higher education umbrella body Universities Scotland said: ‘We have acknowledged from the start that there are no silver bullets for widening access but we know there is real progress being made and this will be reflected in the statistics in due course.’
Higher Education Minister ShirleyAnne Somerville said: ‘Scotland is gifted with a wide range of worldclass universities and we need to make sure that all of our higher education institutions are accessible.
‘Through our continued focus on widening access to higher education and our work with our higher education institutions, we will continue to see improvements, ensuring all our young people get an equal chance to get a world-class education.’
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