Access to higher education cannot be widened if the focus is narrow
ONE of Nicola Sturgeon’s earliest actions as First Minister was to set up a group of experts to look at how to make higher education in Scotland fairer and more accessible. The Commission on Widening Access, chaired by Dame Ruth Silver, was tasked with making recommendations on action the Government could take to ensure young people from disadvantaged areas will have an equal chance of going to university as their peers from better-off backgrounds.
The Commission’s final report and recommendations have been published. The headlines focused on two recommendations: that targets should be set, for individual universities and higher education as a whole, for a certain proportion of students from the most disadvantaged areas; and that universities should set “access thresholds” for applicants from deprived backgrounds that could, in practice, mean accepting lower grades alongside other non-academic factors.
These proposals formed part of a broader theme: that we need concerted, wide-ranging, national reform to improve access. Universities should collaborate more and work with other organisations such as schools, colleges, councils and even nurseries to ensure faster and substantive progress. A Commissioner for Fair Access should be appointed to oversee this work, acting on behalf of disadvantaged learners and holding universities and other providers to account.
As a Scotland-wide university, with more than15,000 students, the Open University welcomes a national approach and there’s a lot more we can do as a sector. Successful access projects and expertise exist across our universities and there’s much that we can learn from each other. We know that deprivation and inequality can have a negative impact on learners from a very young age, so it’s crucial that we join forces with schools and others in early years education.
The commission’s remit focused on the traditional transition of 17 and 18-year-olds from school into full-time university. The report acknowledges that it doesn’t discuss barriers in areas such as race, age, disability and gender, access for learners in rural areas and part-time study.
Students do not follow a single linear journey. Immediately after school is not always the right time in a person’s life to choose higher education. We mustn’t make 18 a “make-or-break” age for university. Many students will go on to college first or choose to come back to education later. As we live and work longer, we must have the ability to pick different paths and to learn flexibly, where and when we need it; and to change our minds as jobs or circumstances change.
What do we mean when we talk about widening access? At present the main method for measuring disadvantage is the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) based on the postcode in which a person lives. SIMD is a useful measure, but it’s very broad and doesn’t tell us anything about the student as an individual. We don’t know how they are disadvantaged or, therefore, how best to help them.
People can face disadvantage and not live in a disadvantaged area. In particular, SIMD struggles to reflect the deprivation faced by people in rural areas. The Open University delivers on access as measured purely by SIMD – 17 per cent of our students are from Scotland’s most deprived 20 per cent of backgrounds – but it’s important to measure access in a more rounded way, so the recommendation to think about other ways to look at this, alongside SIMD, is welcome.
We often talk about diversity within Scottish education. Our learners need and want different things, have different motivations and face different challenges. It’s our job to make sure they have access to the learning that works best for them. The report goes some way to recognising this, but the new commissioner (if the role is accepted by the Scottish Government) will have to take a sufficiently broad view to capture and promote the different ways students can learn at degree level, including part-time study.
The commission’s report should represent the first stage of a comprehensive process that must not, in seeking to tear barriers down, inadvertently raises new ones. We can’t widen access to higher education with a narrow focus. Susan Stewart is director of The Open University in Scotland.