On the ground
The partnership I work for engages with 73 high schools in South East Scotland and over 2500 higher education applicants every year. One of our bigger jobs is providing information, advice and guidance to these applicants. This largely means helping them sort through contextual admissions policies to help them find their way into their chosen courses. Our students are:
- first in family to go to university
- from low-income backgrounds
- young carers
- care experienced
- estranged from their families and living independently
- from SIMD 20 postcodes
- attending a priority school which has low progression to higher education
Our role often starts with aspiration raising, sometimes as far down the school as S3. Within each year’s cohort, we see many who have achieved brilliantly and would have no need of a contextual offer going by their grades alone. However other factors in their lives mean that they are often not considering higher education as a destination. We see other students who have the desire to apply to university and who may not have achieved as high grades on paper, but who have overcome huge barriers to achieve the grades they have. Their results show the potential they have to succeed. This is the key point of contextualised admissions; that someone who achieves BBBBB’s in Scottish Highers whilst caring for a disabled parent is as worthy of a place at university as someone who achieves AAAAA’s with no barriers to their learning. It’s about potential and the playing field absolutely should be levelled. Students who have grown up going through the care system and have still achieved a good set of exam passes deserve to be looked at as much as those who have not had to face those issues. If blunt exam results is all admissions teams consider, then universities would be only for those who had the luck of being born into privilege.
I could tell many tales of applicants that have stuck in my memory. On the LEAPS stand at a UCAS event I met a student who had five “A” passes at Higher. She asked me if she was allowed to apply to university because no one in her family ever had before. This still shocks me and I remind myself of it each time I sit down with a student. Recently I spoke to a student who had lived with a parent with addiction problems and the student had to work to support their family. They then became a carer as the health of the parent sadly deteriorated. However, showing amazing tenacity, they achieved five B passes in Higher.
Everyone in my team has similar stories to tell of brilliant achievement in the face of inordinate barriers. Contextual admissions hold these barriers down and allow students to walk over them and onto the future they want to have.
There is, however, a sting in the tail. In Scotland, the Government has committed to funding university places for Scottish domiciled students who choose to stay in Scotland to study and this policy is regularly reiterated as being a priority. On the face of it, this is an excellent commitment and does help many people to consider higher education without the burden of a high level of student debt looming in their futures. What it does, however, is cap the number of places available at Scottish universities for Scottish domiciled students. So, if a university is committed to giving a number of places to students with contextual factors, but they also have a limited amount of places available in the first place, something clearly has to give. And what worries me, on this Journey to A Million, is will the strategy of contextual admissions be maintained or will it be compromised? If contextual admissions holds barriers down, as places become even scarcer and pressure builds on universities, will these barriers slowly spring back up? Time will tell but I sincerely hope not.