Private providers leave UK higher education ‘cold spots’ untouched

Private higher education providers have clustered in English cities with high levels of student enrolment rather than operating in deprived areas where tertiary-level education rates are lower, according to new research.

Since 2010, ministers have encouraged the creation of more for-profit providers in the hope that “challenger” institutions would add choice and innovation to the sector but also increase educational access in communities with low participation rates or those that are not served by an established university.

But researchers from the University of Oxford and Durham University have found that 56 per cent of private providers are located in areas with the highest rates of post-18 participation in education and where existing education providers are already concentrated.

Only 10 per cent of the 722 for-profit provider sites surveyed in England are found in areas with the least amount of educational participation and provision, says the research, due to be presented to the British Sociological Association’s annual conference this month.

As young people from disadvantaged areas are least likely to move outside their community to study, the “implication [that] this national distribution [of private providers] has for widening participation is bleak”, the study concludes.

“There may be solid commercial reasons for this distribution but potentially disadvantaged students already remote from public higher education provision are unlikely to find a workable alternative in the private sector,” it says.

Stephen Hunt, a researcher in Oxford’s department for continuing education, who undertook the study with Durham’s Vikki Boliver, said the expansion of for-profit providers had helped many disadvantaged young people to reach higher education but had not done so in educational “cold spots” where it was hoped they would have an impact.

“If you look at GSM London – which is now closed – it did a good job of picking up students, though mainly those from within a 10-mile radius of its campus,” Dr Hunt told Times Higher Education.

“But widening participation through private providers hasn’t happened at the scale it needs to make an impact and it is also very concentrated in specific areas that often have established public providers.”

There were noticeable absences of for-profit providers in coastal regions, south-west England and areas of the north-west beyond Manchester and Liverpool, said Dr Hunt, who added that he did not expect these to be filled in the near future because government policy seemed less interested in encouraging for-profits to set up shop.

Previous research by Dr Hunt and Professor Boliver found that half of the private providers operating in the UK had exited the sector between 2014 and 2017, either closing or no longer offering higher-level courses.

“We have seen a policy shift toward focusing on further education – with private providers very much absent from the recent policy decisions,” said Dr Hunt.

“You might have expected to see government subsidising private providers to go into educational cold spots given the emphasis on ‘levelling up’, but it hasn’t happened.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com