Last bank holiday, I took my 13-year-old son to visit Royal Holloway, University of London, where my nephew is a first-year undergraduate, and loving it. He will be moving out of the Founder’s Building in a few weeks, the accommodation my family affectionately call ‘Hogwarts’. As Royal Holloway’s website states, ‘the Founder’s Building is one of the world’s most spectacular university buildings’, having been opened by Queen Victoria in 1886. What better place to inspire my son to start to think about life beyond school, and to catch up with my nephew over lunch.
According to statistics that HEPI and UPP polling uncovered last year, ‘around one-third of people (34 per cent) have never visited a university’ in the UK and ‘a further 32 per cent of people have not visited a university in the past five years’. I started to wonder what brings people to campuses if they aren’t about to apply to university or aren’t connected to someone who is already studying or working in higher education.
