22/02/2019
What is widening participation?
The term 'widening participation' refers to the support that is provided to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to enable them to access higher education, do well, and graduate. Widening participation aims to ensure that universities reflect social diversity.
What is Impetus doing to widen participation?
We work with charities like The Access Project and IntoUniversity to improve university access for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Many organisations like these rely on widening participation funding. Currently, the government requires universities to set aside a proportion of their fee income for widening participation programmes.
Our widening participation recommendations for government
Impetus is calling on the government to protect widening participation funding to close the university access gap.
Together with a number of third sector organisations we've formed the Fair Access Coalition and issued a statement on widening participation, ahead of this year’s spending review and in response to the Augur review:
- Irrespective of what tuition fee regime is implemented, we call on the government to protect widening participation funding, while building the momentum around spending it effectively.
- We urge the government to avoid adding complexity to the higher education funding landscape and to ensure that all students have the information, advice and guidance they need to make good choices in higher education.
- We urge the government to increase the amount of maintenance support available to young people, for instance by restoring maintenance grants, so that university is affordable for everyone.
- We urge the government not to impose a cap on student numbers. When student places are restricted, disadvantaged students suffer most.
We’ve published our full submission to the Augar review, and you can read the Impetus submission to the Spending Review, which includes our recommendations for the government’s response to Augar.
We're also calling on government to help ensure recent social mobility gains are not sent into reverse – which is a danger of tuition fee cuts.
Read about Impetus' other policy and research areas including: