Student Access & Participation Plan update

The University is committed to providing opportunities to all students who are equipped to benefit irrespective of background or personal circumstances.

Although our student population has diversified over the past five years in terms of ethnicity and disability, our current student population disproportionately represents the more advantaged parts of society.

Our Access and Participation Plan (APP) sets out how we’re improving equality of opportunity in higher education, and is approved by the Office for Students (OfS).

The University has set out targets to increase access and participation from disadvantaged groups.

Progress to date

We exceeded all  of our targets with relation to access for 2021/22 entry, and improved significantly on two of these from 2020/21 entry – attributed to an improvement in main cycle applications from students in these groups: 

• increased the proportion of students coming from areas with lowest participation in higher education. Our internal figures now show a ratio of 4.4 students from the areas of highest participation per student from areas of least participation – exceeding our target of 5.5:1 students from most: least participation.

• increased the proportion of white students from deprived backgrounds from 11.9% in 2020/21 to 14.1% in 2021/22 - against a target of 13.7% 

Other highlights: 

• significant improvements in the proportions of students from the most deprived students as measured by the Index of Multiple Deprivation and those students with Household incomes below £25k
• Also improved from 2020/21 are proportions of Asian, Black, Mixed and Other ethnicities and students from state schools. All these groups are proactively targeted in our outreach work and access-funded recruitment activity 

There are however notable drops in the numbers of students with declared disabilities and mature students. Further work is required to understand if this is a Reading specific issue, or if this can be attributed to the pandemic (e.g. increased numbers of students in these groups deferring studies).

The success in meeting and exceeding these targets is likely a combination of factors, but it is considered that the re-aligning of entry requirements and the use of contextualised offers, combined with proactive targeting of these groups in our outreach work and access-funded recruitment activity have and continue to be critical actions that have enabled this progress.