Higher Education: Equality

(asked on 28th August 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to improve diversity among (a) students and (b) academic staff in higher education.


Answered by
Michelle Donelan Portrait
Michelle Donelan
Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
This question was answered on 8th September 2020

It is crucial that we tap into the talent the UK has to offer and that higher education is available to all who are qualified by attainment to pursue it.

The government brought forward sweeping reforms of higher education to promote equality of opportunity through the Higher Education and Research Act (2017). This includes a mandatory condition of registration which requires all higher education providers in England registered with the Office for Students (OfS) to publish data including the number of applications for admissions, offers made and acceptance rates broken down by gender, ethnicity and socio-economic background. The OfS has issued guidance to higher education providers on how to comply with the transparency condition.

Higher education providers wishing to charge higher level tuition fees must have an Access and Participation Plan agreed by the OfS. Through these plans, providers set out the measures they will take to ensure that students from disadvantaged backgrounds and unrepresented groups can access and succeed in higher education. Ambitious new five-year Access and Participation Plans have been agreed for 2020-21 to 2024-25, which include targets and measures to close long standing gaps in equalities.

Recent data shows that the black ethnic group have seen the greatest proportional increase in progression rates to higher education by age 19 – from 44.1% in 2009-10 to 59.1% in 2018/19.

The OfS has also made available online an interactive dashboard of data, which will help to evaluate access and participation at specific universities and colleges. The dashboard can be used to compare different student groups (for example, disabled students or students by their ethnic background) and their peers, and reveal gaps in access, continuation, success and progression. More information is available at:
https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/access-and-participation-data-dashboard/.

Higher education providers are independent and autonomous institutions and are responsible for their own decisions on employment issues. We expect providers, like all employers, to give due consideration to their obligations under the Equality Act 2010 and the way their employment practices affect different sections of their communities and staff at different stages of their careers.

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