UCAS’s recent end-of-cycle report showed that the number of students going to higher education from the country’s lowest-participation neighbourhoods has increased by more than 50% since 2013. In a different time, the news would have been a cause for wider celebration. However, against the backdrop of a Government more concerned with what happens when students finish higher education and another re-boot of widening access work, this remarkable achievement has passed by relatively quietly. It deserves far more recognition and certainly more exploration. The increase in applications from local areas with the lowest rate of participation, or POLAR quintile 1 neighbourhoods, has been steady from 2013 to 2021, as the graph below shows. The last two years have seen quite a rapid jump, associated to an extent with changes in how young students’ examinations have been graded due to COVID (although those from more affluent backgrounds appear to have benefited disproportionately), but progress has been visible since the early 2010s.
