To Widen Participation We Have to Widen Higher Education

On 22 May, the UPP Foundation published a report: “Cold spots and calculated risk: understanding attitudes to higher education in Doncaster” (UPP Foundation Inquiry 2025). Short, sharp and highly relevant, everyone who works in higher education should read it - it’s a humdinger. It shows why our current HE system is falling short in its efforts to open up access to people from disadvantaged backgrounds. In doing so it illustrates the radical change in mindset needed to design an HE system that has any chance of further widening participation and boosting social mobility.

The report interviewed young people and parents in Doncaster about their attitudes to higher education, having chosen Doncaster as an instructive example of an HE “cold spot”; the number of young people going into HE (36.5%) is over 11% lower than the average for England, and is even lower (16.5%) for those on free school meals. Although there are many other areas with higher levels of economic disadvantage and lower educational attainment, on just about every measure Doncaster is struggling, and has no university within its boundaries.

It’s a good choice. The LEI knows Doncaster well, having partnered with the City to produce the March 2022 report “Learning Ecosystems: A new model for levelling up skills in Doncaster”, and the City of Doncaster Council is one of our members. It’s a city that has risen to the challenge of raising education and skills levels with an energetic and ambitious “talent and innovation” strategy.

The UPP’s findings are stark. The careers advice and guidance offered by schools and colleges is inconsistent and ineffective. The combination of a lack of graduate level jobs available locally, an aversion to student loan debt, and the high cost of living away from home while earning little or nothing, means that going to university is an unattractive option to the majority. The report also recognises the classic working class ethic of sticking together in the face of adversity; “for Doncaster residents, family, community and a sense of home drive their choices”. The report concludes that the fundamental problem can be characterised as “an intergenerational trap”, in which parents and children share a perception that going to university is not a good choice.

And herein lies the problem. Throughout, the report conflates higher education with “going to university”. It only briefly mentions Doncaster College, the local FEC with a significant HE offer, part of the under-appreciated national network of College Based Higher Education providers explored in our recent report, “Taking Higher Education Further” (March 2025). It assumes that the key challenge is how to get young people from low income backgrounds to go to university even when there isn’t one on their doorstep. In short, it assumes that we need to widen participation by making the current HE delivery model attractive to working class school leavers. In fact the question needs to be completely flipped over: the real challenge is how to move away from the obsession with three year full time degrees and radically re-engineer the delivery model of higher education to make it far better adapted to the needs of people like the residents of Doncaster.

The opinions UPP express point to three features that a genuinely accessible HE system needs to have baked in to its design. Firstly, it needs to support earning and learning at the same time. Models such as degree apprenticeships and part-time flexible Higher Technical Qualification (HTQ) pathways are far better suited to hard-pressed families.  Secondly, it needs to enable older students – the ones who are working in the sort of local jobs seen as aspirational by interviewees, such as plumbers or electricians – to return to higher level skills training on a part-time basis when they are ready to progress in their careers. And thirdly, it needs to tackle intergenerational reluctance to embrace higher education with strategies that encourage intergenerational participation.

This, of course, is exactly what the Lifelong Learning Entitlement is aiming to do. It’s what the HTQ initiative and the Institutes of Technology network aim to do. It’s what a more flexible approach to apprenticeships through the Growth and Skills Levy is attempting. But the shift in attitudes across the HE sector needed to move in this direction at the pace and scale needed to make a real difference, is only slowly materialising. This is not surprising given the level of effort and investment universities have made in dramatically expanding the numbers of school leavers going to university, as successive governments since the 1990s have asked them to do. This has been a historic and in many ways successful change. But it has also generated the kinds of problems we’re now all too aware of: a  continuing mismatch between higher level skills supply and demand, a saturated graduate jobs market, a falling graduate earnings premium, and a growing disillusionment amongst many sections of the population with university as a route to success. The answer is not to keep doing more of the same, but to do things differently.

To be fair, the UPP researchers are planning to produce a follow-up to this report which may well make recommendations along the lines we’re suggesting here. But to do that they’ll have to move well beyond the tired notion of HE “cold spots”. The key to tackling the challenge of widening participation in places like Doncaster is to stop promoting a historically embedded model of HE built around middle-class culture and values, and instead to design a much more diverse system that embraces the reality of working class life and culture.

We need to listen to the voice of Doncaster.