The Sutton Trust today welcomed the national strategy for fair access developed by OFFA and HEFCE. James Turner, Sutton Trust Director of Programmes said:

“The new national strategy for access represents a positive step towards breaking the link between family background and the opportunity to attend university.  It is particularly good to see a focus on collaboration and on using and gathering evidence to inform practice.  Too little work in this area has been rigorously evaluated and there are some schools and neighbourhoods which receive very little outreach work, while others are inundated with opportunities.

“Our Sutton Trust summer schools, and other flagship programmes, represent some of the most significant partnerships in the higher education sector, reaching thousands of young people across the UK through dozens of leading universities.  And we are doing more than ever to gather evidence and evaluate our own work.  This year we have introduced a common evaluation framework across all our programmes, run by Durham University, and we will shortly release an international review of research on access to inform future initiatives.”

Read the full national strategy for fair access here.

NOTES TO EDITORS

  1. The Sutton Trust is a foundation set up in 1997, dedicated to improving social mobility through education. It has published over 140 research studies and funded and evaluated programmes that have helped hundreds of thousands of young people of all ages, from early years through to access to the professions.
  2. The Sutton Trust’s week long UK summer schools are designed to give bright students from non-privileged homes a taste of life at a leading university.  The programme reaches over 1,900 sixth form students across ten leading universities – Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Imperial, King’s College London, Nottingham, the Royal Veterinary College, St Andrews and UCL. Independent evaluation has shown that young people have a significantly higher chance of going to a leading university if they attend one of the summer schools, with over three quarters (76%) going on to a leading university (either a member of the Russell or 1994 Groups) compared to just over half (55%) of students with similar academic and social profiles who did not apply to the scheme.