Risk 1: Knowledge and skills
Students may not have equal opportunity to develop the knowledge and skills required to be accepted onto higher education courses that match their expectations and ambitions.
Explanation
Differences over access to a high quality education, and the resources needed to fully engage with it (including time and support), may limit opportunity.
Students may have less chance to acquire the knowledge and skills needed for successful higher education, or to achieve grades that reflect their knowledge and skills.
It may also limit the range of subject and course options available, for example, at Key Stage 5.
Factors that influence this can include (but are not limited to) a student’s home circumstances, the school that they attend or the area where they live.
Experiencing this risk is likely to impact a student at the access, on-course and at the progression stages of their education.
- Low attainment at Key Stage 4 and 5, and/or limited subject choice at Key Stage 5 for students from certain areas, schools or with certain characteristics.
- This is likely to subsequently impact progression rates to higher education.
- Where students are accepted into higher education courses, it may also have a detrimental impact on their on-course success.
Students who are:
- from a low household income
- first in family
- disabled
- mature
- white students*
- from Gypsy, Traveller or Roma ethnic groups, or the Boater and Showmen communities
- service children
- young carers
- care experienced
- children in need
- male*
- prisoners.
Note that the ordering does not denote a scale or ranking system.
Intersectionality
It is important to consider how different student characteristics might interact with each other, and with school and areas-based characteristics. Providers may also wish to consider whether the mode of study heightens a risk.
For example, for each of the student groups listed above with an asterisk (*), students who have been eligible for free school meals in the past six years are more at risk that their counterparts who were not eligible for free school meals in the past six years and in many cases, the non-free school meals counterparts are achieving higher than the national average.
It is therefore recommended that providers consider intersectionality closely when looking at their own data.
For different groups of students, the impact of these risks that are visible in data might be:
- low application rates
- low progression rates to higher education
- low offer rates
- high rates of students not meeting the conditions of an offer
- low application rates to particular subjects by students from certain schools, areas or groups
- low on-course success rates for students.
Although this is a national risk, the extent to which it is seen at each provider may depend on factors such as:
- location
- entrance tariff
- whether the provider recruits nationally or locally.
We encourage providers to examine their own data and establish if this risk to equality of opportunity affects their current or potential student population.
It is important to note that the different types of impact that unequal opportunity has in this area will be apparent at a much earlier stage than higher education: differences in attainment, for example, are clearly visible in datasets from Key Stages 1 for students from free school meals backgrounds. They persist throughout primary and secondary education.
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