The latest HESA research shows students living in areas with a higher proportion of lone parent families are less likely to know if any parent has higher education qualifications.
Research into social mobility shows that students are more likely to enter higher education if their parents also attended university. To measure the participation of under-represented students, the UCAS application form asks students if any of their parents or guardians have higher education qualifications.
However, around 15% of applicants either do not complete the parental education question or answer that they don’t know. To explore the potential reasons for this ‘missing’ data, HESA researchers have studied the characteristics of students who answered ‘I don’t know’.
Using census data to identify neighbourhoods with high proportions of lone parent families, HESA researchers observed that students from these postcodes were more likely to answer ‘I don’t know’ than students from areas with lower percentages of single parent households.
