Leading universities ‘making little progress’ in recruitment of poor students

England’s top universities have made “little or no headline progress” in recruiting students from poorer families in recent years, a watchdog has warned.

Despite making a considerable effort and spending millions of pounds, the performance of these selective institutions has remained flat, according to a new report by the Office for Fair Access (OFFA). It suggests that this group of universities must do more to offer activities and schemes that will help to boost the numbers of disadvantaged students going into higher education.

In his foreword to the report, OFFA director Professor Les Ebdon warns that an “unacceptably large” gap remains between the numbers of rich and poor students attending leading universities.

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OFFA’s annual report examines the performance of England’s universities in widening participation, such as offering bursaries and fee waivers as well as “outreach” activities such as summer schools and masterclasses for teenagers. The findings, for the year 2011/12 – the final year before tuition fees were tripled to a maximum of £9,000 – show a mixed picture.

It reveals that universities spent more than a billion pounds in total on widening participation.

Universities charging over the basic tuition fee, which in 2011/12 was £1,345, must sign an access agreement setting out how they plan to recruit more students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The latest report shows that institutions spent £444.1m of their higher fee income on bursaries and outreach activities in 2011/12, compared with £424.2m in 2010/11.

But the report also shows that while this has gone up in cash terms, universities actually spent a slightly smaller percentage of their extra income from tuition fees compared with the previous year.

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OFFA insisted it was not concerned by this, as it had been predicted and was down to the global economic situation, uncertainty about funding and institutions preparing for the new fee system.

Dr Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, which represents 24 leading universities, including Oxford and Cambridge said: “There are complex socio-economic problems which mean students from disadvantaged backgrounds all too often fail to achieve the right grades in the right subjects or do not apply to selective universities.

“Our universities put a lot of effort into trying to help solve these problems but we cannot do so alone.”