Let’s eliminate the ethnicity degree-awarding gap with efficacy and truth

Advancing racial equity in UK higher education has received long overdue national attention in the past decade, thanks in no small part to student-led “decolonise” campaigns and the paradigm-shifting wave of activism inspired by Black Lives Matter.

Nevertheless, most universities still report a notable difference in the proportion of students from marginalised ethnic backgrounds who are awarded a first or upper-second class degrees compared with white students.

The Office for Students’ Access and Participation Plan (APP) targets a significant narrowing of these ethnicity degree-awarding gaps by 2028, with a view to their complete elimination by 2038. However, dwindling finances have left many universities – especially those outside the Russell Group – struggling to commit the necessary resources.

It should surprise nobody that ethnicity degree-awarding gaps have no single cause. Yet universities have only recently started to move away from a deficit approach that seeks to “fix the student”, rather than address the structural and systemic issues embedded within academia.

Our new book, Race, Capital, and Equity in Higher Education, seeks not only to join these causal dots, but also to identify clear strategies to support racial equity in higher education. It is the product of more than a decade of work for the Student Success Team at the University of Kent – which, as a non-Russell Group institution with a strong research profile and a rapidly diversifying undergraduate community, can be argued to represent the “median” English university.

Interviews with our Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students have alerted us to some key nuances that lie between race and class. For instance, while middle class BME students are able to challenge curriculum norms by deploying forms of “Black cultural capital”, others have to reach for alternative success-enhancing strategies, such as befriending peers who can help them make sense of degree study while collectively managing their parents’ expectations of academic success.

Nor should we ignore the relevance of entry qualifications. The BTEC offers a crucial alternative pathway to university, especially for those in areas with limited post-16 options. Yet this more vocational A level equivalent has often been maligned in education and popular culture, such that BTEC entrants often find that their skillsets are insufficiently recognised in university assessment criteria. For students of colour especially, lecturers’ familiar refrain of “you may remember this from A Level” further undermines feelings of institutional belonging.

But minority ethnic students are not passive “victims”, as is sometimes implied in EDI policy discourse. The rise of Kent’s African Caribbean Society (ACS), for example, exemplifies Black student empowerment on campus, transitioning from a social events group to a key representative voice. This was evident in how the ACS challenged Kent Students’ Union’s botched handling of Black History Month in 2016 and pushed university management to respond to Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

Similarly, we can point to how students from Kent Law School led the way in advancing the “Decolonise UKC” push, galvanising collective voices to foreground systematically marginalised indigenous knowledge and overlooked racially minoritised lived experiences.

But while university management should rightly take inspiration from student organising, this has to be more than diversity window-dressing. Too often, EDI practitioners find themselves stuck in the worst of all worlds. Adversaries regard them as joylessly exploiting their supposed deep-state power to disrupt natural justice, when, in reality, their work is hamstrung by restlessly shifting policy agendas, short-termist project structures and an institutional tendency to “do the document” rather than “do the doing” (to borrow Sara Ahmed’s memorable phrase).

Yet Student Success at Kent has managed to circumvent some of these challenges, evolving over a decade from a two-year pilot study to a permanent fixture embedded in the university’s strategy for advancing racial equity. This has enabled the team to create a platform for fostering initiatives that can make a real difference.

For example, the Diversity Mark programme has taken decisive steps towards diversifying course curricula by facilitating critical dialogues between module conveners and students of colour (who are paid as “diversity mark officers”). This has prompted academics to better engage with students through more diverse and global reading lists, resource content and culturally sensitive assignments. Such innovative, collaborative work creates a welcoming, racially diverse and inclusive learning environment for all students.

Yet there remains much to be achieved. Audre Lorde’s famous assertion that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is often invoked to capture the pessimism many feel when contemplating structural change within societal institutions. We in higher education are not immune to this pessimism. Like so many UK institutions, universities have struggled to overcome their imperial past and forge an authentically equitable present, and we must be prepared to at least repurpose – as well as outright discard – many of the tools available to us.

But we should also not lose sight of what universities can – and should – offer their students and staff. To this end, we call on the wisdom of bell hooks, who argued that the classroom should act as a community, with engaging dialogue and action among teachers and students that is uplifting, compassionate, responsible and honest.

As higher education professionals, we can only address ethnicity degree-awarding gaps with true efficacy by first being true to ourselves.

Alexander Hensby is a senior lecturer in sociology and a research fellow in student success at the University of Kent, where Barbara Adewumi is a senior research fellow and BAME staff network (EDI) co-chair. Their book, Race, Capital, and Equity in Higher Education – Challenging Differential Academic Attainment in UK Universities, is published open access by Springer Nature.