Fair access to university has been an enduring theme of my work for over 20 years. I have looked at undergraduate student funding and hardship in Wales (Taylor and Gorard, 2001), the difficulties of deciding which social and economic groups might be underrepresented in HE in the UK (Gorard, 2008b), what can be done to address under-representation (Gorard et al, 2017e), why some ethnic groups are over-represented (See et al, 2012), and what happens to students when they arrive at university (Selwyn and Gorard, 2016).

This chapter focuses on widening participation to undergraduate HE. The patterns of participation in HE in England were portrayed earlier in Chapter 3, although similar patterns appear in Wales, the rest of the UK and across the world (Gorard, 2005d). When in the ‘pipeline’ to HE do these socio-economic patterns first appear, when are they strongest, what causes them and what can be done about them? Can we overcome the stratification by using contextualised admissions (CA), as is ongoing policy in the UK at the time of writing (Gorard, 2016c; Boliver et al, 2016, 2017)?

Policy approaches to widening participation

Access to HE is patterned by inequalities worldwide, and it is difficult to change that pattern through compensatory education and similar approaches (Neve et al, 2017). In most countries and contexts the most important barrier to participation in HE is prior attainment (Raffe et al, 2006; Broecke and Hamed, 2008). Student intakes to universities in the UK are and have always been stratified in terms of SES and other characteristics (Gorard et al, 2007a) – perhaps more so than in other developed countries (Jerrim and Vignoles, 2015). Students from less advantaged social and economic backgrounds are underrepresented, especially in the UK's most selective universities and in some subjects leading to professional occupations (Broecke, 2015).

Despite an increase in the number of students studying at HE level in the UK, and estimates place it at 43 per cent of the 18-30 age group (Attwood, 2010), it is still the case that inequalities persist with regard to who participates and who does not. The home countries of the UK, EU member states and many countries worldwide have concerns about the stratified nature of the student body in first-time undergraduate HE (Triventi, 2011).