Sir Peter Lampl responds to the higher education White Paper

Commenting on the higher education White Paper, Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman of the Sutton Trust and of the Education Endowment Foundation, said:

“We welcome the White Paper’s focus on access, and its assertion of the independence of the Director of Fair Access within the new arrangements. However, we are disappointed that the government has apparently dropped encouraging proposals to give the director more powers to set targets where universities are not making progress. This softening of the original proposals is likely to make it much harder to increase the participation of disadvantaged students.”

NOTES TO EDITORS

1. The Sutton Trust is a foundation set up in 1997, dedicated to improving social mobility through education. It has published over 170 research studies and funded and evaluated programmes that have helped hundreds of thousands of young people of all ages, from early years through to access to the professions.
2. The White Paper confirms the Prime Minister’s commitments to widening participation in higher education, which are: to double the proportion of people from disadvantaged backgrounds entering university in 2020 compared to 2009, and to increase the number of black and minority ethnic (BME) students going to university by 20% by 2020.