Access in Alba

I’ve spent the past week visiting our partner universities in Scotland. It was great to go back to St Andrews, where I was an undergraduate more years ago than I care to mention; certainly the university and the town have changed a great deal, with the English department where I spent much of my academic life now renamed Poetry House and an overall air of much greater prosperity and warmth – although perhaps that’s just because the B&B where I stayed had much better heating than my draughty undergraduate flat…

I was there to talk to the university Access and Outreach team about the Sutton Trust summer schools they ran this year – for teachers and students – and their plans for next year. We have 135 places at our St Andrew’s summer school, drawing students from across Scotland.

As I’ve said before, teachers play a hugely important part in shaping the aspirations of their pupils, as well as guiding them through the minefield of the university application process – especially vital for pupils who don’t have any family members with university experience- but it can be difficult to reach the teachers we need to help us pass on the message about our summer schools. At St Andrews we discussed the challenge of reaching teachers in more rural areas of NE Scotland, and how we might develop our programmes to address this next year- watch this space for more details.

My visit coincided with a big debate on access in the Scottish press, as attention focused on the importance of contextual admissions, prompted by the interim report of the Scottish Government’s Commission on Widening Access. Despite the sterling work of Scottish universities, by some measures the access challenge is now sharper in Scotland than in England. That will help shape our future work there, I have no doubt.

My visit to St. Andrews followed the excellent review days we had earlier in the autumn with all the partner universities who work with us on our summer schools. As part of the meeting we discussed the initial findings into the impact of our 2015 programmes, carried out by the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring at Durham University.

Our summer schools are free, subject-specific residential courses for year 12 (or equivalent) students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and are designed to give them a taste of life at a leading university and find out what it’s like to study a subject to degree level. We aim to demystify elite universities and to equip students, most of whom will be the first in their families to go on to higher education, with the knowledge and insight to make successful applications to top universities. This year we had over 10,000 applicants to our summer schools, and awarded places to nearly 2000. Applications for the 2016 summer schools will open in January, and we expect to have more places next year.

The survey sent to students after they’d attended the summer school asked for their views on the most useful aspects of attending a summer school, with the majority responses being to find out what studying a particular subject is like and to find out what university life is like; this is great to hear and really chimes with our reasons for running the programme.

The Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring is also carrying out a piece of longer-term work for us, looking at the progression of students who took part in our summer schools from 2007 to now. By accessing data from HESA (the Higher Education Statistics Agency) we’ll be able to see the higher education destination and degree subject of our students, and for earlier years, the class of degree awarded and employment six months after graduation.

It will be a fascinating piece of research that will really help us to demonstrate the value that our programmes bring to those who attend.