“Currently more than £1 billion is spent annually on widening access and participation and supporting disadvantaged students. Whilst we support the overall approach to access, participation and success for disadvantaged students we note with surprise the absence of any over-arching assessment of the impact of different approaches to widening participation and success.” 

So said the recently published Augar report on higher and further education

There is no over-arching assessment because it would be too embarrassing for the sector to be honest about how £1,000,000,000 every year achieves so little. So how could Augar support the overall approach? OFFA was soft and all too often blind-sided by access agreements which were long on rhetoric and short on results. What it never argued for was a root and branch review of national WP strategy, instead it created a labyrinthine bureaucracy which forced universities to snow them with good intentions in order to hide the poverty of real results.

Universities are spending more than £1,000,000,000 every year on highly local campaigns with a too little, too late focus on teenagers, supported by so-called Access Agreements that are to be polite, thin on the ground when it comes to KPIs and real achievement.

If you want to persuade more of the disadvantaged to go on to further or higher education, you have to begin to change social attitudes much earlier, starting with parents before their children are even born. In the same way that governments have run social attitude campaigns over decades making smoking and drink-driving socially unacceptable, so I would advocate a long-term communications campaign designed to make aspiration cool, persuading parents to want more for their children than they ever achieved themselves. Especially parents in areas such as the North-East and the South-West where poverty of aspiration is seriously entrenched. I know. If I had not escaped Middlesbrough, I would never have gone on to become the first in my family to go to university.

There is so much emphasis on tuition fee pricing in the report when the real financial issue facing disadvantaged students is living costs. They really don’t have a problem with the tuition fee, recognising that it produces a level playing field, and will be written off if they can’t repay. Their real problem is surviving at university when there’s no Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on. £3,000 in the form of a re- introduction of the maintenance grant is just about enough to keep them going for part of a term. That's why they take on too many jobs at the expense of their studies. Why they take paid work in the summer with local companies that no-one's ever heard of because they can't afford to take lowly paid internships with well- known national companies which would boost their CV. 

So, here’s a few suggestions which will move away from tokenism and deliver some real momentum: 

1. Invest £35m every year via the Dept of Education to run a decade-long communications campaign using mostly social media to raise aspirations in parts of the country where they are stubbornly low. 

2. Pay disadvantaged students a salary of £12,000 pa - a salary, not a loan, so that when they finish their studies, they feel free to choose a worthwhile career they have a passion for, not just go after the money.

3. Reduce the amount of money that universities spend on local outreach - but demand performance-related KPIs.

4. Invest more in WP students via careers services to provide them with the social capital that others get from their families and networks.

The new OfS initiative on widening participation is long overdue. Let's hope it's tougher, more imaginative and much less bureaucratic than that delivered in the past.