Back in the summer of 1997, Helena Kennedy proclaimed that the case for widening participation to higher and further education was “irresistible”.  National strategies were drawn up, Whitehall circulars issued, and, two years later, Tony Blair stood before the Labour conference and pledged that 50 per cent of young people should go to university by 2010.

Things seemed simpler then. While progress has been made in the overall rate of young people going to higher education in universities and FE colleges, there remain troubling gaps in the progression of poorer and part-time students. As a generation of policymakers and practitioners have discovered, supporting students from disadvantaged groups to enter higher education is no easy matter.

In fact, it looks increasingly as if widening participation should be assigned to that category of frustrating issues which Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber once termed “wicked problems”. The two American city planners argued that such dilemmas are distinguished not by any inherent level of difficulty but by a special set of characteristics. Wicked problems have no agreed definition, involve mind-bending interdependencies and offer no obvious endpoint for judging success.

Target group

True to form, the issue of improving access is devilishly hard to frame. How, to begin with, should we construct a target group of students? Is the best proxy for disadvantage where a young person lives, what type of school or college they go to, their household income or their parents’ social class? We now have multiple measures and multi-limbed indices with which to evaluate the problem but no consensus on which to use. Without a common way of looking at the problem, we cannot definitively say if the situation is improving.  

We could, like the newly formed Office for Students, argue that the best way to judge disadvantage is by comparing progression rates across small areas (the so-called POLAR measure). If so, we could point to the HESA statistics which tell us that, since 2010, the entry rate from the bottom fifth of neighbourhoods has risen from 10 to 11.4 per cent, but remained broadly static in the last three years. Alternatively, we could look at the most recent Department of Education numbers, which show that the progression rate of students on free school meals (FSM) has increased from 13 per cent to 24 per cent but that the gap between these students and their non-FSM counterparts has stayed the same at 18 percentage points.

The picture is further complicated by the question of when students make transitions. The issue is particularly acute when considering further education. As a population, FE students are almost twice as likely to be in receipt of free school meals than their peers in maintained schools and academy sixth forms. The largest linked dataset provided by the former Department for Business, Innovation and Skills showed that the immediate progression rate of students from further to higher education stood at 32 per cent for the 2007-8 cohort. Five years later, the rate had increased to 48 per cent, proving both the importance of longitudinal tracking and the difficulty of making judgements at any particular moment in time.

Just as there is no simple way of defining the wicked problem of widening participation, so there is no closed set of solutions. If you are playing chess you have a limited number of moves. If you want to improve access to higher education where should you start: mentoring students, engaging teachers, talking to parents or conducting a national advertising campaign?

Teacher engagement

Up to now, the vast majority of access work has focused on students. A small rostrum of activities - campus trips, talks, mentoring, masterclasses, and revision sessions - remain dominant. While these activities may be of some benefit, they share the same limitations. Student-centred activities are difficult to target, need frequent repetition, and, perhaps most importantly of all, they bypass the true setting of the problem.

As research from the DfE and IFS has shown, what really seems to matter for students is what happens in the classroom. No amount of trips or talks will make a difference if a student does not get the grades they need and the right advice and guidance from their teachers. The key to unlocking the widening participation problem may not be to provide more activities for students but to increase efforts with teachers.

At Causeway Education, our own experience bears testament to the importance of engaging with teachers. In 2013, Professor Vikki Boliver produced a paper which showed that even when students from the state sector got the same grades as their independently educated peers, they were still up to a third less likely to receive an offer from a leading university.  In response, we ran a mentoring programme with the Sutton Trust focused on improving applications. The headline statistics for the academic apprenticeship were impressive: every single one of the students received at least one offer from a Russell Group university compared to 73 per cent of students in the comparison group.

One of the key elements of the programme encouraged students to complete an academic topic of interest for use in their personal statements. When our students returned in the summer, some reported that their teachers had told them to remove this content as it was too “long” and “impersonal”. Subsequent work showed that, when assessing the same personal statements, teachers and academics agreed in only 23 per cent of cases. Since these findings, we have looked at the systems high-progression institutions use to support their students and our access champions programme works with a senior teacher in lower-progression schools and colleges to replicate them.

To solve wicked problems, we need collaborative strategies. Our Partnerships for Change conference today brings together universities, schools, colleges, and charities to see how we can work better together. At Causeway Education, we believe that the collaboration between teachers and universities should be at the fore.

Dr Michael Englard is co-founder of Causeway Education