BU Research Blog

There are five reports touching on social mobility this week, lots of education statistics released, and we’ve almost Brexited.  After all the focus on Parliamentary process over the last two and a half years, the ping pong was over before it really started.  There is scope for more before the end of the year, although given the government majority are seemingly united on Brexit, we are going to have to look elsewhere for Parliamentary excitement.  Perhaps HS2, Heathrow’s third runway and some of the other big projects up for debate in 2020 will have us all watching Parliament TV again.  Or maybe not.

Research policy developments

There have been a lot of announcements over the weekend and the Minister gave a big speech on Friday, so for BU staff we have summarised the latest developments for you here.

Global Talent Visa:

• “A new Global Talent Visa, increased investment in mathematical sciences and commitments to strengthen and simplify the research and innovation funding system have been announced by the Prime Minister.
• A new fast-track visa scheme to attract the world’s top scientists, researchers and mathematicians will open on 20 February. The bespoke Global Talent route will have no cap on the number of people able to come to the UK, demonstrating the Government’s commitment to supporting top talent.
• It replaces the Tier 1 (Exceptional Talent) route and UK Research and Innovation will endorse applicants from the scientific and research community.”

Maths funding:

• “Also announced by the Prime Minister was a significant boost to the UK’s world-leading mathematical sciences community, increasing support for this key discipline and expanding the pool of trained mathematicians.
• Up to £300 million of additional funding will more than double the current funding for the mathematical sciences delivered by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)”.

Research Professional say:

• It is also “subject to business case”, so it might never see the light of day. Nonetheless, the £60m commitment in principle is to be welcomed, and will provide £19m of additional funding for PhD studentships (double the existing funding, ministers say). There is also £34m of additional funding for “career pathways and new research projects”, and £7m a year extra to be shared between Bristol’s Heilbronn Institute for Mathematical Research, the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge and the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh.

Reduction of research bureaucracy

• “In line with the commitment to reduce administration for researchers and innovators, UKRI has also announced that applicants to UKRI will no longer be required to provide a ‘Pathways to Impact’ plan or complete an ‘Impact Summary’ within grant applications from 1 March 2020.
• The impact agenda remains incredibly important and UKRI exists to fund the researchers who generate the knowledge that society needs, and the innovators who can turn this knowledge into public benefit.
• Pathways to Impact has been in place for over a decade and we recognise the research and innovation landscape has changed since its implementation and impact is now a core consideration throughout the grant application process.
• The move supports UKRI’s ambition to create a stronger research and innovation environment that is focussed on supporting talented people and realising the full potential of their work.”

Research Integrity paper: See the paper here:

Research Professional say:

• Universities should be doing more to ensure the integrity of their research and to retain the trust of society at large, says a paper from League of European Research Universities.
• The Leru paper published on 24 January is co-authored by Antoine Hol, a law professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and Inge Lerouge, an ethics and integrity coordinator at KU Leuven in Belgium, with an input from its thematic group on the issue.
• “Universities should be at the forefront of developing and implementing new approaches to research integrity that will maintain and strengthen the confidence of the public, governments, research funders and end users,” say Hol and Lerouge in the paper.
• Among their recommendations are that universities should devise and share research integrity guidelines, appoint specialist personnel on the issue, and make integrity education mandatory for students.

Chris Skidmore speech on research and innovation (24^th Jan)

Parliamentary News

• Education Appointments  – Scott Mann (Conservative, Wadebridge) has been appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Education Minister Gavin Williamson. Previously he was a PPS within the Dept for Work and Pensions. Chris Green (Conservative, Manchester Withington) retails his pre-election role as the DfE PPS. Innes Taylor has been appointed as Gavin Williamson’s SPAD (special advisor).
• Labour Leadership Contest – Jess Phillips dropped out of the Labour leadership contest this week. Lisa Nandy has been endorsed by the GMB union and already had the support of the National Union of Mineworkers. Scroll halfway through this article to read the BBC’s analysis of all the candidates chances (spoiler – Sir Kier Starmer is still in the lead).
• Brexit – The Lords amended the Withdrawal Bill this week starting the ping pong process. The Government threw out the amendments and the Lords acquiesced, so passing the Bill. So 4 years on from the referendum, after 2 general elections, 3 Prime Ministers, 3 extensions, and 4 exit days…The European Union Withdrawal Act 2019 has now had Royal Assent and is on the statute book. Boris has (almost) delivered (phase 1 of) his Brexit and the UK will leave the EU on 31^st January 2020 (next Friday).

Longitudinal education outcomes  (LEO)

The Department for Education has published experimental statistics showing employment and earnings outcomes of HE graduates by provider and current region of residence based on the LEO (longitudinal education outcomes) data.

• Graduates earn a median annual salary of £19,900 one year after graduating, £23,300 after three years, £26,000 after five, and £30,500 after ten years.
• Graduates in all regions of the country earn on average around 20% more than their peers in the same region who did not go to university.
• After adjusting for region, there is still variation in the median earnings outcomes between HE institutions, with 25% of institutions having average adjusted graduate earnings of £23,200 or below and 25% of institutions having adjusted graduate earnings of £28,500 or above.
• At the individual institution level, controlling for regional destination can make a significant difference for some institutions; 16.9% of institutions see a change of 10% or more in their median earnings.
• When looking at HE institutions whose graduates now live in London, half had median earnings of £29,400, five years after graduation – the highest across all current regions.

Universities Minister Chris Skidmore said:

• It’s great to see that all over the country, it pays to have a degree from our world-leading universities, and they are bringing benefits to all of the regions. This data is a milestone for the thousands of future students, helping them to work out whether university is for them, and where to study and work. I hope this will particularly help students from disadvantaged backgrounds to see the benefits, who are often more likely to stay in their home region. Of course earnings potential is just one factor for students, but we believe they should have all the facts to make their decision. It is important for young people to know that they will not only get a rich education at university, but that their degree will be good value for money.

Wonkhe have an analysis by David Kernohan:

• The region a graduate lives in has an impact on provider level medians. DfE use a weighted median in their top level data (which I haven’t plotted here for reasons that will become clear), and gleefully reports significant differences between median salary by provider even after a graduate region-based weighting is applied.
• Of course, a gold standard LEO would absolutely need take into account subject of study and provider alongside current region (or indeed, local authority) of residence – alongside the sex of a graduate, their GCSE performance, and a suitable measure of inequality. However, such a nuanced examination would provide numbers too small to publish without identifying individuals.
• There is hopefully a point in the middle, where LEO gives us enough information to be usable while remaining publishable. This release is not at that point, but I feel like we are gradually iterating around it.
• The publication itself is clear on the limitations:
• It should be noted that the data presented here does not control for many other factors that can influence graduate outcomes e.g. prior attainment, subject studied and other characteristics. It should also be noted that a higher education will have a range of personal and societal benefits that extend beyond earnings, which by its nature are not captured in the statistics presented here.”
• So how useful is the weighted median? If we’re not controlling by subject or by sex, not very.

David has, of course, done a chart and you can play with where students studied (by region) and where they are currently based.  How useful is it – well, as with all these things, it depends what you are looking for.  What will be interesting will be to see what it means for the new TEF, where they included LEO as additional data in the last pilot and have long said that they would like to reflect regional differences in the metrics, but have previously only supported that with some high level maps and an opportunity to make your case for regional differences in your provider submission.  So we’ll see.

Staff in HE

DfE and HESA released the Higher Education Staff Statistics 2018/19. Key points:

• There were 439,955 staff (excluding atypical staff) employed in the HE sector, showing an increase of 2% from 429,560 on 1 December 2017.
• HE staff employed on academic contracts made up 49% of the population. This percentage has remained the same since 2013/14.
• There were 296,185 staff employed on full-time contracts. This is an increase of 2% from 289,730 in 2017/18.
• The number of staff on part-time contracts increased by 3% from 139,830 in 2017/18 to 143,765 in 2018/19.

Again, Wonkhe were quick off the mark with analysis from David Kernohan looking at data about senior BME staff in HE following headlines that there are no Black senior academics” – it seems it’s a rounding issue:

• “..in the 2014/15 academic year there were between 0 and 2 Black senior academics in UK HE – a state of affairs that continued until 2016/17. At that point there were between 3 and 5 Black senior academics in the UK… which continued until 2018/19 when the number once again dropped below 3.
• As Chris Skidmore put it: “It is unacceptable that the number of black academic staff in senior positions has fallen, as this does not represent our British society. Universities need to make more progress and I urge all vice-chancellors to address the barriers that are holding back black and ethnic minority staff from senior positions.”
• He actually worded that fairly well – others in and around the sector went for the shocking (if less accurate) “no Black senior academics” framing….
• So where does this leave Chris Skidmore (and the many journalists that have gone along with the ministerial line)? He’s right to be concerned about the poor representation of Black academics at the top of our academic providers, and he’s right that the situation needs to be improved.”

The Times Higher Education chose a different angle:

• Teaching-only contracts up again as REF approaches.  Almost a third of staff in UK higher education are now classed as teaching-only
• The Hesa data were released as Research England published figures showing that 22,500 more academics – measured by full-time equivalent – are set to be entered into the 2021 REF because of new rules that require all staff with “significant responsibility for research” to be submitted.
• In practice, anyone with a teaching-only contract will not have to be entered, a key reason why it has been suggested that institutions are moving staff perceived to be underperforming in research to teaching-only contracts.
• Last year, an analysis by Times Higher Education based on 2017-18 figures found that about a fifth of universities had substantially increased their share of academics on teaching-only contracts, while 12 institutions had a quarter of full-time staff on teaching-only terms.
• Elsewhere, the latest Hesa staff statistics showed that the rise in the share of professors who are female increased by a percentage point again in 2018-19 to reach 27 per cent, while for “other senior academics” the female share rose to 38 per cent from 36 per cent. Overall numbers of black academics grew by 11 per cent, but they still represent just 2 per cent of all academic staff.
• …The number of part-time contracts was up a percentage point more than full-time contracts, while the share of full-time academic staff on fixed-term contracts also rose slightly, to 25.3 per cent from 24.9 per cent.
• The number of staff classed as “atypical” – which includes those employed for one-off tasks, for a short amount of time or in roles “that involve a high degree of flexibility” – also increased, by 2 per cent, after having fallen in previous years.
• But specific figures on the number of zero-hours contracts, which include only “typical” staff, showed a drop, from about 11,400 in 2017-18 to 7,000 in 2018-19.
• With Brexit now imminent, the data also showed that the share of academics from other European Union countries remained stable in 2018-19 at 17.5 per cent of total numbers.

At the same time, Wonkhe report: The REF 2021 team at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) reports that nearly 75,000 academic staff are expected to be submitted to REF 2021, a 43 per cent increase, according to the results of a preliminary survey. All subject areas are projected to increase, especially the social sciences. This is due to the implementation of the recommendation of the Stern review that all research-active staff should be submitted to the exercise. A reduction in the number of outputs to 2.5 appears to have ensured that the overall number of outputs to be assessed remains roughly the same as the 2014 REF.

And Research Professional focussed on gender:

• In terms of numbers in higher education, women dominate. Last week, figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency showed that the number of female students was continuing to grow and that women accounted for the majority (57 per cent) of the student population.
• Yesterday, HESA released figures showing that women also make up the majority (54 per cent) of all higher education staff.

…What is the problem?

• First, it’s money. While women, as a majority of students, are contributing a large part of what institutions get in fees, the salaries those fees help to fund seem to be going, in large part, to men.
• The median gender pay gap was 13.7 per cent on average in UK universities in 2018, with men working in higher education earning £7,220 more on average each year than women.
• One reason is that while the overall number of staff working in higher education may be mainly female, the number working in (more highly paid) academic roles is mainly male. The HESA stats show that 27 per cent of professors are women—just one percentage point higher than last year—and women comprise just 38 per cent of staff employed on other senior academic contracts. These numbers have been improving, but at a glacial pace.
• More women are also employed part-time, including 55 per cent of employees in part-time academic roles.
• Recent studies have also shown gender gaps for researchers in success rates for grant applications and in amounts awarded.

The other problem is that it is not just about numbers of women or the size of their salaries. Speaking at yesterday’s conference, Ruth Sealy, associate professor in management and director of impact at the University of Exeter, said it was also important to consider the nature of the roles women were taking on.

• She cited the problem of the “glass cliff”—the idea that women tend to be offered leadership positions at a time of crisis, when it often turns out to be a poisoned chalice. (Think Theresa May after David Cameron’s resignation as prime minister following the Brexit referendum.)
• …Another speaker at the conference, Norma Jarboe, external adviser to the Centre for Diversity Policy Research and Practice at Oxford Brookes University, has been studying diversity among university boards and their chairs, vice-chancellors, leadership teams and heads of academic departments. She has found that 55 per cent of higher education institution boards are gender balanced, compared with 19 per cent in 2013. More than 27 per cent of university governing body chairs are now women—more than twice as many as in 2013, although still low—and in 2018, women made up 29 per cent of vice-chancellors and 37 per cent of all executive team members.
• But she said that pairs of female vice-chancellors and board chairs were still rare, and her greatest concern was the low number of female heads of academic departments—31 per cent—and the fact that this had not moved in the past two years.
• Jarboe said a major problem was the low number of female professors, as a professorial role is often a prerequisite for gaining positions of senior responsibility. “We aren’t going to shift in a big way the numbers in executive teams unless we do something about professorial roles and paths to head into that,” she argued.

Meanwhile, the culture in some university departments remains one in which female staff and students find it difficult to thrive. Launching a consultation on harassment and sexual misconduct earlier this month, Dandridge said the OfS felt that while many institutions were improving their policies in this area, more needed to be done.

• Writing for HE, Antonia Sudkaemper, a researcher at OCR Cambridge Assessment, suggested that men were crucial to creating a more inclusive departmental culture for women.
• What makes all this important—beyond simply being fair—is that higher education has a particularly transformative effect on women.
• Yesterday’s release of post-university earnings data, which focused on how median earnings vary for graduates from different institutions by the region in which they end up working, did not include a breakdown by gender. But previous releases of Longitudinal Education Outcomes have shown that the graduate premium is significantly higher for women than for men—a 28 per cent boost to salaries, compared with just 8 per cent for men, when moderated for social class.”

A levels and progression to HE

DfE released A Level and Other 16 to 18 Results.

Attainment is lower for disadvantaged students compared to non-disadvantaged students across all level 3 qualification types

• The average grade for A levels was C for disadvantaged students (increased from C- in 2018), and C+ for all other students (the same as in 2018).
• The average grade for Tech Levels and Applied General qualifications was Merit+ for all students, regardless of their disadvantage status. This is an increase from Merit to Merit+ for Tech Level disadvantaged students compared to 2018.

English and maths progress increased for students who did not achieve at least GCSE grade 4 or equivalent at the end of key stage 4.

• In 2019, average progress was 0.13 and 0.08 for English and maths respectively. Average progress has steadily increased each year since the measure was introduced in 2016

Level 3 Value Added for A-level disadvantaged students continues to decrease

• Over the last three years, the Level 3 value added scores for A-level disadvantaged students have decreased, from -0.06 to -0.12, at a rate of -0.03 per year. This contrasts with a stable score of 0.00 for non-disadvantaged students.

Read more on gender, ethnicity and disadvantage (including free school meals) breakdowns and the most popular subjects here.

DfE statistics on the destinations of Key stage 4 and 16 to 18 (Key stage 5) students:

• Overall, 94% of pupils were in sustained education, employment or apprenticeships in the year after key stage 4, unchanged from 2016/17.
  • With 86% of this total in sustained education, up 4% since 2010/11 and unchanged from 2016/17

• Apprenticeships and employment destinations rose slightly
• Overall, 88% of students who took mainly level 3 qualifications went to a sustained education, apprenticeship or employment destination. Students taking qualifications at level 2 and below were less likely to have a sustained destination overall. However, they were more likely to enter apprenticeships and employment.

You can read about  progression to HE here.

• Figure 4 shows the progression into HE/training by type of school or college. Selective schools have the highest progression rate at 88%. Non-selective schools situated in highly-selective areas have a much lower progression rate (56%) which remains low after influencing factors are controlled for. You can read more on this interesting phenomenon on page 8.
• Figure 5 highlights the huge disparity between the regions in progressing to HE. London 16-18 year olds are 17% more likely to progress to HE/training than students in the south west (even when controlling for prior attainment and qualification type).  The report questions if this is due to the lack of local easy to access HE institutions within the south west.

Health Maintenance Grants

A Government news story released the detail on the health professions that will benefit from the non-repayable £5,000 (per year) maintenance grant reintroduction (announced in December). The bursary will be in addition to existing support so students will still receive the same loan entitlement. Students on the following programmes will benefit from the grant:

• paramedicine
• midwifery
• nursing (adult, child, mental health, learning disability, joint nursing/social work)
• occupational therapy
• physiotherapy
• operating department practitioner (level 5 courses)
• dietetics
• dental hygiene or dental therapy (level 5 courses)
• orthoptics
• orthotics and prosthetics
• podiatry or chiropody
• radiography (diagnostic and therapeutic)
• speech and language therapy

There are three more additional payments worth £1,000 each (per year) for students meeting special criteria:

• £1,000 towards childcare costs
• £1,000 if studying in a region that is struggling to recruit
• £1,000 if they’re a new student studying a shortage specialism important to delivering the NHS Long Term Plan (mental health nursing, learning disability nursing, radiography (diagnostic and therapeutic), prosthetics and orthotics, orthoptics and podiatry).

So a learning disability nurse with children (who qualify) and who is studying in a problem recruitment area would receive £8,000 per year in addition to eligibility for student loans.

This is part of the Government’s drive to increase numbers of nurses by 50,000 by 2025. The press release says the Government expects the £5,000 maintenance grants to benefit 100,000 students each year.

Unpaid Internships

Lord Holmes of Richmond was successful in the Lords Private Members Bill ballot (again!) that was held in December. He continues his campaign to tackle unpaid internships lasting longer than four weeks and has reintroduced legislation to ban unpaid internships over four weeks (with the intent that they will become paid at a reasonable rate). Lords legislation, and private members bills, often fail to progress through Parliament and become law. However, we’ll be keeping a close eye on this Bill. The date for the second reading has yet to be announced.

Social and Geographic Mobility

The Sutton Trust, in partnership with the LSE Inequalities Institute published a report on social mobility, geographic mobility, and elite occupations. This comes from a summary provided by Dods. The report presents a systemic study of whether elites in the UK are pulling away, economically and socially. Elites here are defined in two senses;

• firstly ‘economic elites’ , a group of the most economically, culturally and socially advantaged in society, and
• ‘occupational elites’ , a much larger group comprising of those who work in professional and managerial jobs, the most privileged group of occupations.

The report finds that becoming socially mobile – moving into a higher professional or managerial job from a working-class background – doesn’t necessarily mean moving away from where you grew up. The report also comments on the elites’ consolidation of London, finding that, for the younger generation (aged 30-36), moving to London and working in an elite occupation is largely the preserve of those from a privileged background in the first place.

• Elites are likely to justify their position through beliefs in meritocracy. However, these meritocratic views are also largely endorsed by the wider population and thus the elite exaggerate rather than repudiate wider common sense perspectives on social mobility.
• Although the impact of private schooling on access to elite universities and firms remains important, their power has slightly waned over the very long run.
• Occupational elites, those employed in higher managerial and professional occupations, have not become more geographically segregated over the period 1981-2011. In fact, outside London, such segregation has declined.
• Over two-thirds of the most socially mobile people born in 1965-1971 and 1975-1981 have never made a long-distance move (69% and 68% respectively). Instead they’ve built careers near to where they grew up in sectors like law, medicine and academia, aided by the growth in professional jobs across the country in the latter part of the century.
• For the younger generation, moving to and living in London at age 30-36 and working in an elite occupation is overwhelmingly associated with being from a privileged background in the first place, and this holds even more true than for older generations
• Those from privileged backgrounds that are most able to migrate to, and remain in London, and can therefore take advantage of the most sought-after career opportunities in Britain’s elite occupations. Therefore, there is an association between geographic mobility and the reproduction of social class advantage, rather than social mobility.
• Conversely, ‘ordinary’ Londoners who move into elite occupations actually tend to move away from London in order to accomplish their ascent.

Recommendations:

• Unpaid internships are a significant barrier to those from less well-off backgrounds outside big cities and exclude those who cannot afford to work for free. To ensure access to opportunities are fair, internships over 4 weeks should always be paid at least the minimum wage. [See our coverage of the Bill here.]
• There needs to be a significant increase in the number of degree and higher-level apprenticeships available across the country, and a focus on ensuring young people from low and moderate income backgrounds can access them.
• Admissions to the best schools and universities should be more equitable, with increased use of contextual admissions by more selective universities, and opening up the best comprehensive, grammar and independent schools to young people of all backgrounds.

Social Mobility Barometer

The Social Mobility Commission’s  annual social mobility barometer which assesses public attitudes to social mobility in the UK. The report underlines stark regional differences in people’s perceptions of their life prospects:

• 31% of people living in the north-east (and 48% in north-west) think there are good opportunities to make progress in their own region, whereas
• 74% believe this in the south-east, and
• 78% in London.

Dame Martina Milburn, Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, said:

• This year’s Social Mobility Barometer gives a clear message to the new Government. It shows that more than half of people feel that government does not give enough support to those who are struggling or to the least well off. It should be doing much more both at national and local level.
• This year the Barometer reveals a worrying divide between opportunities in education and what follows – work, income and job security. Overall 63% of people felt they were better off than their parents in terms of the education they had received, but only 45% felt they had a better standard of living. Less than a third felt they had better job security.
• This suggests that the focus on improving educational opportunities may have started to pay off but much more attention is needed on training, jobs, and pay levels. The majority of people continue to feel there are fewer opportunities for people from disadvantaged backgrounds compared to better-off peers. Almost half of people (44%) say that where you end up in society is largely determined by your background, while twice as many people feel it is becoming harder rather than easier to move up in society. This poll is a ‘call to action’ for this new Government to do more to help social mobility. Politicians must listen to it. This is a great moment to start reversing inequities of generations.

Delving into the detail behind the headlines is the finding that apprenticeships were considered to offer better career progression than HE study. However, there is a stark age difference with the younger generation plumping for HE to pursue a successful career (see page 12 for the full breakdown).

• 77% felt that poorer people have less opportunity to attend a top university with 65% believing poor people’s chances were reduced to attend any university. 49% believed it would also be harder for poorer people to obtain an internship. Interestingly 57% believed poor people had equal opportunity to obtain an apprenticeship.
• Those surveyed who were aged under 50 believed they received a better education than their parents but scored lower on all other factors with the 18-24 and 25-49 age groups particularly negative in their opinion.
• Those born in the 1980s and 1990s were rated highest for the best educational opportunities (despite the fact the tuition fee loan system was in place for this cohort).

Dods report that the Social Mobility Commission poll coincides with the publication of the commission’s research report into further education and recommends that the government set up an independent What Works Centre for Further Education and Adult Learning (proposed budget £20 million over the next 5 years) to act as a knowledge and research hub; translating the best available evidence and testing a variety of approaches to ensure resources for poorer students, who make up the bulk of students in further education, are targeted more effectively.

The NUS responded to both social mobility reports and the FE report but were not in favour of a What Works centre – NUS Vice President (Further Education) Juliana Mohamad-Noor said:

• We welcome the publication’s focus on how to improve education attainment among disadvantaged students and the report can provide a useful evidence base for this. However students have told us that what they need to best help them succeed is more direct investment into further education (FE) rather than investing in a £20 million What Works Centre. FE is in a funding crisis due to cuts since 2010, with students bearing the brunt of these cuts. The government must raise the rate to at least £4,760 per student as a priority if they are to improve attainment.

I believe there are a number of initiatives which could make life better for disadvantaged students. They include:

• Travel passes: City of Liverpool College had travel passes for students with a household income of less than £25,000 who lived more than two miles away and had good attendance.
• Bursary Grants: City of Liverpool College also had a small pot of funding for students who met a similar criteria. I benefitted from this when I was a business student at the College and was granted £200 to buy a laptop so that I could do my coursework outside of the classroom and not be dependent on limited library resources in College or at home.
• Free School Meals. At City of Liverpool only 2 or 3 centres were funded to be able to provide free food at lunchtime. This lack of support meant many students had to spend time travelling to another college where their ID cards would allow them access to the meal allowance, or use their own limited resources to buy food elsewhere.
• Nurseries, such as the one provided at City of Liverpool College for students with young children. This allows both access to education for the students as well as reliable and safe childcare for their young ones.
• Direct investment in response to real student needs in their day-to-day lives is what’s needed to close the education attainment gap among disadvantaged students

Interventions to widen access to HE – impact evaluation

The Education Policy Institute (EPI) has published a report on the impact of interventions for widening access to HE. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are still less likely than their more privileged counterparts to progress to HE. The report finds that, despite considerable investment and many years of widening participation policy, progress has been modest and there appears to be limited evidence on the effectiveness of the interventions carried out. The paper also describes interventions that have proved most effective.

These are the key findings as described by the EPI:

• Overall, there is still a lack of available evidence on the impact of outreach interventions on actual enrolment rates. Much of the existing evidence focusses on intermediate outcomes such as increased aspirations and awareness which may not always translate into actual enrolments.
• Most of the studies analysed found positive but modest effects. There are still some gaps in the research base, and the evidence often does not demonstrate causality; however, there has been an increased focus on robust evaluations.
• Much of the evidence is concentrated on students in their final years of secondary school and post-16 learners (A levels students in particular). Given that differences in attainment can explain much of the participation gap, and that these arise early, there is a lack of evidence on the impact of interventions happening earlier in the student life cycle.
• Most widening participation initiatives analysed were black box interventions combining several outreach components. These combined interventions seem to be associated with improvements in higher education outcomes but drawing definitive conclusions on the effectiveness of the single components is challenging.
• Providing financial aid to disadvantaged students is a high-cost widening participation intervention that has a small but positive effect on enrolment. The literature suggests that financial support is most successful when it is relatively easy to understand and apply for and efforts are made to raise awareness amongst potential beneficiaries.
• Interventions in the area of mentoring, counselling and role models has generally positive association with the outcomes considered. Qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests an increase in students’ confidence to succeed in higher education, higher aspirations and a better understanding of the world of university, especially when the mentors can act as relatable role models for the mentees. Again, much of the literature analyses only changes to intermediate outcomes such as increased aspirations, confidence or awareness, rather than actual enrolments.
• Providing information, advice and guidance to underrepresented students during secondary school is a low-cost, light-touch tool to widen participation. The literature is largely based on fully scalable randomised control trials and indicates limited effects on both aspirations and actual enrolment. The more promising interventions are those that are tailored to the students, start early and are integrated into other forms of support, such as career advice and guidance.
• Summer schools are high-cost interventions that appear to be positively correlated with an increase in confidence and aspirations, but evidence on their effects on application to and acceptance by higher education institutions shows mixed results.

EPI make the following recommendations: [some very familiar messages here!]

• To avoid overestimating the effectiveness of widening participation interventions, it is crucial to provide more causal evidence on the capacity of interventions to translate increased aspirations and awareness into a higher enrolment rate.
• There is a need for more robust research on the impact of black box interventions, with a focus on teasing out the separate effect of each component. Robust monitoring and evaluation should be built into these interventions from the start.
• There is not enough research focused on vulnerable but overlooked groups, such as mature students, carers and care leavers, some ethnic minority students and vocational students.
• More causal evidence on the effectiveness of summer schools should also be carried out. Where randomised control trials are not practical, other quasi-experimental techniques should be applied.
• More research on financial aid is recommended to ensure relevance to the English and UK context.
• The government and its delivery bodies must facilitate greater tracking of the progression outcomes of participants in widening participation interventions over time and between the school, college and the higher education sectors. This would provide improved evidence based on actual enrolments to higher education rather than on self-reported aspirations and attitudes only, and would allow for the development of more research on interventions happening

NCOP (National Collaborative Outreach Programme)

A report on the future of the NCOP (National Collaborative Outreach Programme): Voices: What next for the National Collaborative Outreach Programme? Last week OfS announced they would need to make savings in the HE recurrent funding budgets. They have confirmed they will not cut NCOP allocations, however, they will clawback and repurpose any underspend. Voices is a responsive briefing written by 17 leaders of the 29 regional NCOP consortia on the future of the programme based on this statement:

• “The Office for Students has signalled its intention to financially support the Outreach Hubs to 2025. What recommendations would you, as NCOP Leads, make to OfS decision makers for a national programme to run alongside the Outreach Hubs to ensure that some element of nationally-funded collaborative widening access work continues once NCOP ends in 2021, drawing on your expertise and your own local context?”

The South West leads had this to say in response:

• NCOP partnerships are neatly taking care of collaborative outreach targets, and implicit impartiality. This does not exonerate HE providers from their obligations to provide high-quality institutional WP Outreach, with the potential student as the focus of their work, not the potential recruitment of that student to their institution. The success of the Outreach Hubs will depend, in part, on their ability to signpost to a coherent, broad-ranging institutional WP Outreach offer. HE providers should be supported to build this now, in preparation for meaningful continued collaborative working post July 2021.

Here Dods summarise how the NCOP Consortia see the Future:

• Collaboration is crucial but fragile: Strong relationships between schools, higher education, and further education are being formed but without continued funding
• Commitment to collaboration has to be long term: A recurring theme of the responses was the need for a stable long-term commitment to a funded collaborative infrastructure. This commitment needs to be until 2025 to at least match the APP cycle.
• Starting earlier is key: A strong theme running through the responses was the need to engage with learners earlier, as soon as primary level if possible. A strong theme running through the responses was the need to engage with learners earlier, as soon as primary level if possible.
• Institutional Outreach will not ‘replace’ NCOP targeted activity: If NCOP targeted funding is removed then large groups of learners will lose their support if they do not fit with the priorities of providers in that area, and the risk is that all learners will have what they can learn about HE restricted. This will include those who need greater, more extensive support to progress to HE.
• Direct school involvement matters: Even if funding is to be scaled down there could be a case for transitional support in those areas most badly affected by such a scaling.
• Targeting is important, but targeting who?: There were voices which questioned the present area based approach and whether an individual-level approach would have greater merit. It would possibly assist the Office for Students in understanding what range of approaches to defining disadvantage and educational disadvantage could be the most appropriate in widening access work.
• Fund national but deliver local: The recent interest in civic universities is welcome but will not represent any kind of replacement for a coherent funded commitment made by the HE sector to engaging with the local areas for whom HE does not seem relevant.

You can read the (relatively short) full document here.

Grammar Schools

Arguments over the abolition, taxing, and expansion of grammar schools were features of GE2019 and they’re still topical in 2020. In January 2019 HEPI published an occasional paper by Iain Mansfield The Impact of Selective Secondary Education on Progression to HE which found that attending a grammar school increased the likelihood of attending a highly-selective university for disadvantaged pupils. However, this week HEPI have published a collection of essays – Social Mobility and HE: Are grammar schools the answer? refuting Iain’s claims that grammar schooling has a positive effect for deprived pupils. In short:

• The data used by Iain Mansfield was flawed – the exclusion of (missing) income data from higher income families makes it appear more grammar students come from poorer households that is actually the case.
• Any positive benefits for individuals from attending grammar schools are outweighed by negative effects on those who do not pass the 11+. Furthermore, selection depresses overall educational achievement and harms the chances of the poorest children. There are also moral arguments against the social segregation that is the consequence of selective secondary education. At a time of increasing social division and inequality in England, authors argue that a high-quality and comprehensive system which educates all pupils effectively is needed.
• Grammar schools thrive as a result of having highly selective universities, and because of their diverse classroom learning experience which matches well with university study.
• There are geographical differences in areas which have grammar schools – generally they’re more affluent. This means it is not possible to attribute all differences in progression rates between selective and non-selective areas to grammar schools rather than differences in the pupil population or other factors.
• Personal ideologies have not coloured the academic debate on grammar schools as Mansfield suggests.

Contributors, John Furlong & Ingrid Lunt, Emeritus Professors of Education, University of Oxford said:

• Increased mobility that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s did not come about as a result of grammar schools but because of structural changes that brought about substantially increased opportunities for social mobility. There literally was ‘more room at the top’ that had to be filled whether or not there were grammar schools at the time…In a society that aspires to greater social equality and equality of opportunity there can be little justification for the continued existence of grammar schools today, let alone their expansion. They are the product of educational thinking from a very different era from our own. They are part of our educational history; that does not mean they should be part of our educational future.

Iain Mansfield blogged for HEPI in response to the latest paper both welcoming it for the contribution it makes to the body of evidence on the topic but also raising concerns on factors not addressed. He re-highlights his original points on unconscious bias and speaks out against the comprehensive university model. He concludes:

• Academic selection is a fundamentally complex subject, involving complex trade-offs that impact on different individuals in society in diverse and varied ways. Selection may be applied at different ages, on a general or a specialist basis, and both between and within schools, for example with streaming and setting. It may be applied with differing degrees of flexibility or movement between schools and under a wide variety of different funding frameworks, from the highly inequitable one prevailing in the 1950s to one significantly more progressive, in which greater resources are provided to those most in need. There are no easy answers to any of this – but it is a matter which deserves to be discussed and researched by a diverse group of individuals with different perspectives, not a closed circle of those who have already made up their minds.

Immigration

This week The Times reported PM Boris has confirmed he will axe the £30,000 minimum salary threshold for immigrants arriving after Brexit through the planned Australian-style points system. The Times state:

• Under Mr Johnson’s plan migrants’ earnings will be taken into account as part of their application to enter the UK. Other criteria could include English proficiency, educational qualifications, occupation and willingness to work in particular areas of Britain.
• While the prime minister is understood to have the support of his cabinet, ditching the £30,000 criteria will still be controversial in the Tory party.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Eurosceptic MP and former Conservative leader, said they should be cautious about ditching the £30,000 threshold. They will need to have very strong checks in place to ensure that they deliver on their pledge to control immigration.  Anti-immigration campaign group Migration Watch UK are reported as warning that the number of migrants coming to Britain could rise sharply under a points-based system.

The Migration Advisory Committee will publish a report next week on how the new points-based system would work and the Government is expected to publish an immigration white paper in March 2020. The Government intends for the new immigration system to be introduced immediately at the end of the Brexit transition period in December 2020.

Assistive Technology

Universities, Science, Research and Innovation Minister  Chris Skidmore  has made an announcement  on technology to support pupils with special education needs.  From Dods: Chris Skidmore’s EdTech related speech at the BETT show has now been published.

• The government’s EdTech testbed programme launched with Durham University, will match schools and colleges with leading EdTech products created to tackle specific educational challenges, like homework marking, or parental engagement.
  I’m pleased to announce today that in 2020 we intend to achieve a world-first, and develop a new Assistive Technology testbed aimed at transforming learning for pupils with special educational needs and disability. 
• At the school level, we’ve put more than £80 million to create the National Centre for Computing Education, to improve the quality of computing teaching across England and to encourage more girls to take the subject.
• On the college level, we’ve established the National College of Digital Skills, better known as Ada. We have also started to open the first 12 Institutes of Technology (IoTs), backed by £170m of government funding, to offer higher technical education in key sectors including digital. 

The Education Minister speaks

Gavin Williamson spoke to more than 100 education ministers from around the globe at the Education World Forum, setting out his vision for British education.  HE commentators were disappointed about the (lack of) priority given to HE in the speech.  There’s a transcript of the speech here.

• …For the first time, the latest PISA results show 15-year-olds in England achieving scores above the OECD national averages in reading, maths and science.
• …Last year we set up a £2.5 million programme to help encourage international exchanges, with a particular focus on children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Thanks to that programme, children from 138 schools have or are planning to travel to countries as far-ranging such as Austria and Zambia. Today, I’m thrilled to announce a one-year extension to this International School Exchange programme, and its expansion to include primary school children in Years 5 and 6.
• We truly do hold the tools to make a global difference and a global change. So many people turn to us to provide them with a chance to succeed in life. To free themselves sometimes from the poverty they’ve known, or the lack of ambition that others have experienced. We have that ability to level up, to give people, young people, the chance for them to succeed, for our nations to succeed, and for every generation to be able to contribute more to their nations but also to the globe. That is what we can, and that is what we will do.

On HE:

• We recognise for our higher education institutions to remain the best in the world, that is done through international collaboration, working with others, making sure that research and study is always an international endeavour.
• Of course, a traditional academic education isn’t the be all and end all, and we’re all rapidly finding this out. It’s 2020, and we all live in a modern global economy—one that is set to be transformed by AI, automation and other technologies, and which will require a new and constantly changing skillset for our workforce. And those might not be the kind of skills that we can necessarily always develop within universities or traditional academia.
• As a result, every country across the world is now putting a much bigger focus on further and technical education, so that we can build a workforce that’s fighting fit for the future and able to deal with the new challenges and opportunities that the globe faces.

Other news

• Strong growth: The Open Innovation team have published Cautionary Tales from History an economics focused blog examining Britain’s exponential economic success during the 16^th  and 17^th Centuries. The blog considers the influence of policy and questions whether the growth enabling elements could be harnessed today to address left behind regions in the UK. The blog concludes that in the past strong Government with an efficient system of taxation and public finance alongside strong markets which were not manipulated by special interest groups (guilds, landlords, the church, etc) and a strong civil society were the social conditions behind the success of the industrial revolution.
• Care Leavers: The Care Leaver Progression Partnership have promoted the latest Stand Alone report What Happens Next? which explores care leavers transitioning out of HE. And Care Day will be held on 21 February.

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JANE FORSTER                                            |                       SARAH CARTER

Policy Advisor                                                                     Policy & Public Affairs Officer

Follow: @PolicyBU on Twitter                   |                       policy@bournemouth.ac.uk