Posted 4 February 2025

Go Higher West Yorkshire (GHWY) welcomes a report the National Educational Opportunities Network (NEON) has published that focuses on regional inequalities in access to Higher Education (HE) for those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.  

The report examines the latest data released by the Department for Education on HE participation among learners from Free School Meal (FSM) and non-FSM backgrounds. 

One key finding demonstrated that although more FSM learners are attending HE, proportionally many more non-FSM learners are progressing to HE as well. When looking at ‘changes from 2012-13 to 2022-23. The number of non-FSM pupils progressing to higher education increased by 36,232 over this period while the number of FSM pupils progressing to higher education increased by only 6,270.’  

The regional story 

In different regions, different pictures are emerging in relation to fair access. In 2012-13 to 2022-23, ‘eleven local authority areas saw their FSM higher education participation rate at least double during the period. These areas are spread across England.’ In comparison, ‘Four areas went backwards during the period, and another 26 areas saw an increase of less than 25% over the decade despite a national increase of 36% over the period.’  

West Yorkshire’s picture 

The report gives GHWY further evidence to underpin our mission to reduce inequalities in higher education access and success in our region. We work with a number of underrepresented groups in HE including males on FSM. According to DfE statistics, 391,190 school-aged learners were eligible for FSM in West Yorkshire in 2023-24. 

Despite NEON’s report painting a patchy picture of what gains were achieved nationally, it highlights that in West Yorkshire significant increases have been made. There has been an increase of 56.52% of FSM learners participating in HE. In 2012-13, 16.1% of HE entrants were FSM learners in Yorkshire and the Humber, increasing to 25.2% in 2022-23. 

Zooming in to Local Authority level in our region, Leeds was shown to be ninth in the top 10 of areas where HE Participation for FSM learners has increased the most, going from 12.1% in 2012-13 and 24.4% in 2022-23, with a decade increase of 101.65%.  

Our response to the report’s recommendations 

As the future of collaborative outreach is being debated, we value reports such as this that lay bare what still needs to be done in the access arena and give ideas about how we may do this in the future.

We respond to some of the report’s recommendations below: 

An increase in resources from the present Uni Connect level: For every £1 put into Uni Connect, £5-9 is returned to the economy, according to the 2024 Public First Review of Collaborative Report for Improving Equality of Access to HE.  

Make Happen’s Uni Connect Past Present Future publication states that Uni Connect has worked with 1.5 million learners from underrepresented groups nationally from 2017 to present. We believe the reach could be further and more targeted with more funding as we have the networks, infrastructure and research base well established after eight years of delivery.  The missing piece is the resources to work at a larger scale. 

Setting of regional targets for FSM participation in higher education: We also welcome this recommendation. To focus strategic energy, it would be helpful to have targets in the regions that need them. 

A dedicated national co-ordination function which is separate from the higher education regulator to better achieve the potential for efficiencies: This makes sense, as all Uni Connects have developed their own approach which has led to many overlaps of great practice. If there was a better way of coordinating across all Uni Connect projects, work could be shared more rather than being duplicated. This model is being explored for the future with the Office for Student’s (OfS) theory of change for the future of collaborative outreach. Suggestions include a centrally developed resource bank that would be headed up by the HE regulator, OfS. 

Further information 

If the issues in this article are of interest, you may be interested in exploring how GHWY work with Males on FSMs.  

We recently presented a CPD session titled Creating Successful Outreach Projects for Males on Free School Meals aimed at key influencers, teachers and advisors which can be viewed as a webinar on our website.   

We have also published our free to use resources for our outreach programme aimed at Males on FSM aged 11-18 on our website, entitled Speak Up, Your Voice Matters. 

 

Jenny Scannell, GHWY Project Manager and Officer