All we’ve done really is target the committed students and given them the extra year to help them get here

Professor Matthew Walters, head of medicine, dentistry and nursing at Glasgow, said: “The students have been a delight to teach ... and have done well in the exams”

travel here every day. The reach programme and the summer school I attended changed everything.”

Melanie Gilmour, a former pupil of Govan High, found out about the GAP programme after she’d completed her Highers. “I’d thought about medicine,” she said, “but never really made it apparent to anyone because no one from my area had done that before. So I applied and was surprised to get an interview a week later. If it wasn’t for this programme I wouldn’t have been able to study medicine.”

Life at an elite university can be a daunting prospect for students who are coming from a working-class area. Often they may be the only pupils from their class who have made it through the obstacle course and arrive on day one alone.

They may experience feelings of alienation caused by lack of finances as they encounter a big, confident student body seemingly at ease with themselves. Many will have experienced a degree of trauma in their home lives and in the challenges of simply surviving in edgy areas.

Fiona Spence, from Port Glasgow, was pleasantly surprised, though, at her initial experiences among Glasgow University’s student body.

“I did think initially the class thing might be a factor, but I haven’t experienced any judgmentalism at all. Everyone’s been very friendly and welcoming, although they all knew from the outset who the GAP students were. I was a bit scared that I might not fit in, but it just hasn’t been an issue. I also feel that what’s for you won’t go by you and that it was simply a case of keeping at it and taking the chances as they arrived.”

Professor Matthew Walters, head of medicine, dentistry and nursing at Glasgow, has been impressed by the attitude of the students from the widening access programmes.

“The students have been a delight to teach; they’ve engaged fully on this and have done well in the exams. The difference has been the desire and the commitment of the students themselves. We give them the basic science they need and clinical contextualisation of that science. Not just the science of medicine of medicine but the art of medicine.

“All we’ve done really is target the committed students and given them the extra year to help them get here. We’ve taken into account those circumstances that might previously have prevented them getting here and blocked them out and provided them with a route to get here.”

Here again, programmes such as these come up against opposition stemming from entrenched attitudes.

Surely, it’s claimed, that if you ease the entrance tariff for medicine and the law then you risk undermining intellectual integrity?

At worst this can lead to obvious catastrophes. In law and medicine there can surely be no room for sentiment or reduced rigour? Professor Walters counters this