‘Aimhigher 2.0’ urged to reboot ‘stagnating’ widening access

England needs a new national coordinating body for university access, separate from the sector regulator, to tackle “worrying stagnation” in widening participation, a report says.

The paper from the National Education Opportunities Network (Neon), published on 14 January, says that pupils who are eligible for free school meals have fallen further behind their classmates on degree enrolments over the past decade, with the gap in entry rates stretching from 17.5 percentage points in 2012-13 to 20.8 percentage points in 2022-23.

And it finds highly variable rates of progress at local authority level, with the free school meal access gap between London and every other English region increasing over the past decade. Entry rates from the south west are now more than 30 percentage points behind those in the capital.

The report, which was due to be launched at a Westminster reception attended by skills minister Jacqui Smith, recommends the creation of a “dedicated national coordination function which is separate from the higher education regulator to better achieve the potential for efficiencies”.

Such a move would take responsibility for outreach activities away from the Office for Students and recreate something akin to Aimhigher, the collaborative network of more than 40 access programmes involving universities, colleges and schools which was scrapped in 2011.

It would put greater emphasis on regional collaboration on university access, with greater sharing of activity between providers, rather than leaving the responsibility to individual institutions.

The report highlights that the participation rate for learners eligible for free school meals increased by 1.22 percentage points annually from 2005-06 to 2011-12, before Aimhigher’s closure, before dropping to 0.79 percentage points over the following decade, when its work was either defunded or supported at much smaller scales.

“A stronger focus on a collaborative, partnership based approach to widening access will recognise more openly that after over 20 years of work, there are some things that are best done collaboratively and some led by individual higher education providers,” says the report, co-authored by Neon director Graeme Atherton, former executive director of Aimhigher London West, Central and North.

The report also advocates the setting of regional targets for free school meal participation in higher education “that all providers in the area should align their outreach work to”, and the establishment of national streams of collaborative outreach for groups who face significant access challenges but are relatively small in number – for example, Gypsies, Roma and Travellers, and care-leavers.

Neon, based at the University of West London, also urges an increase in funding for the OfS’ surviving collaborative outreach programme, Uni Connect, which now has a budget of just £20 million, down from £60 million in 2020-21.

The report acknowledges that boosting support would be “challenging given the present funding environment for higher education but could be approached in part by potentially more pooling of resources and sharing of services between higher education providers at the points in the student lifecycle where access work makes more sense collaboratively, for example at pre-16 [ages]”.

“This year’s data shows a worrying slowdown in progress in terms of widening access to higher education and shows again clearly the huge differences in future opportunities that young people from low-income backgrounds face across the country,” Atherton said.

“As the government looks to break down regional inequalities post-‘levelling up’, higher education progression has to be a central concern.”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com