Peter Scott

Commissioner for Fair Access

Scotland has a good story to tell about working towards fair access to colleges and universities – a better story than England despite claims the high fees charged south of the border can be used to recycle money into targeted programmes for more deprived students.

Still, as my latest Annual Report tries to show, complacency is always a risk. A lot remains to done. Contextual admissions, in other words adjusting offers to take account of past disadvantage, need to be used more adventurously. Students with Higher Nationals deserve a better deal in terms of universities giving them greater credit for their achievement.

But there are two big unresolved issues about fair access, which have the potential to act as a drag on future progress and which I highlight on my report.

The first is so-called ‘displacement’, the fear that some applicants will get squeezed out if more places are earmarked for applicants from the 20-per-cent most deprived communities in Scotland. The potential losers are far from privileged and worked hard to get good Higher grades only to see applicants with worse grades get – unfair? – preference.

The fear is real enough. Very occasionally I get letters from parents, who mistakenly believe I am an ombudsman, complaining their daughters or sons have been discriminated against. I can easily imagine the many more letters in the post bags of Ministers, MSPs and university principals.

But is the fear justified? In my report I have tried to present the available data. The verdict at this stage has to be ‘not proven’. It is unlikely that any significant number of applicants have been squeezed out of higher education completely as a result of the drive to fair access, although they may not have got into their first-choice course or university.

The Scottish Government could help by providing more funded places. As a university academic I naturally support the claims of higher education for extra public funding. But at the same time I have to recognise competing claims, particularly from schools and the health service. Maybe we also need to be honest about fair access. How would it be if opportunities for men had to remain unchanged while promoting gender equality?

The other big issue with the potential to act as a drag on fair access is the complaint that, by using an area-based measure, applicants living in the 20-per-cent most deprived areas according to the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD), equally deprived applicants from others areas get ignored. This is a real problem in rural and more sparsely populated areas like the Highlands and Islands (for example, Shetland doesn’t have a single SIMD20 area), the Borders and maybe the north east; much less of a problem in the central belt.

Obviously the measure of deprivation should be made be as accurate, and as fair, as possible. That is why an expert group has recommended that university applicants who have ever received free school meals should also be counted. I support that recommendation, as I support the idea that care-experienced applicants should receive special treatment.

But I would defend the use of SIMD as a core measure. Fair access is not just about cherry picking bright individuals – what has, maybe unfairly, been called ‘getting poor kids into posh universities’. Universities also have a responsibility for addressing deep-rooted inter-generational community deprivation, to serve the whole nation not just its more privileged citizens.

We need to move beyond social mobility and focus instead on social justice, on building a fairer and more equal society. Higher education can – and must – help.