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Higher education’s postcode lottery: How geography and disadvantage shape university access in England

by Frances Sit and Graeme Atherton

Across the world, access to higher education is often shaped as much by geography as by ability or aspiration. For many students, this can be starkly literal: the distance to a campus, the availability of local courses, and the time, travel, and financial costs of attending university determine whether learners can study close to home, work, care for family, or take the first steps toward the careers and social mobility that higher education uniquely enables.

In England, this reality is recently brought into sharp focus when the University of Essex announced the closure of its campus in the coastal city of Southend-on-Sea. By August 2026, the nearest routes into higher education for local students will be further away, harder to reach, and more costly. What will disappear is not just a campus, but a locally anchored gateway to opportunity.

The story of Southend matters because it reflects a broader national pattern. Across England, learners from coastal areas like Southend, smaller towns, rural communities or other ‘cold spots’ are facing similar barriers, making them systematically less likely to progress to higher education than their peers in cities or more well-served regions. Our report Coast and Country: Access to Higher Education Cold Spots in England lays bare the scale of these disparities, highlighting how geography continues to shape opportunity – and what must be done to address it.

A national picture that hides local realities

Drawing on ‘Widening Participation in Higher Education’ data published annually by the Department for Education, our report examines the differences in higher education participation by age 19 for state-funded pupils living in different types of places in England. We focus specifically on learners eligible for free school meals (FSM), who are among the most disadvantaged in the education system and a critical group for understanding equity in higher education.

At a national level, higher education participation for FSM learners stood at 29% in 2022/23. But this headline figure masks stark geographical variation. Excluding London areas, which account for only 16% of England’s population, the average progression rate outside the capital fell to just 23%. London’s strong performance is obscuring a far more challenging situation across much of the rest of the country.

Disparities become sharper as places become smaller. In 2022/23, the average higher education progression rate for FSM learners fell steadily from 42% in core cities to just 19% in villages and rural areas. Coastal communities see notably lower progression as well. Their average higher education progression rate for FSM learners in 2022/23 was 11 percentage points lower than in inland areas, with pupils in many coastal areas having less than a one-in-five chance of going on to higher education.   

All in all, as depicted in Diagram 1, it is in rural villages where FSM learners had the least chance of progressing to higher education. Coastal locations also tend to have lower participation rates compared to their inland counterparts, even when the areas are similar in size and settlement type.

Diagram 1: Average FSM higher education participation rates in different area types in 2022/23

Explaining the gaps – and why place matters

It is often argued that disparities in HE progression are largely explained by attainment in schools, and for a number of years increasing attainment was the priority where widening access work was concerned for the Office for Students. In the report, we mapped GCSE attainment at the area level against FSM higher education progression rates in 2022/23 and we indeed found a strong correlation (𝑟=0.9001). However, that relationship between prior attainment and FSM higher education participation becomes much weaker when it comes to rural villages and coastal areas (𝑟=0.4181 for rural villages; 𝑟=0.4733 for coastal areas). In these communities, improving attainment alone does not fully address low higher education participation.

The presence of a higher education provider can also be a decisive factor in participation. In our report, we mapped the distribution of universities and colleges in England. HE providers are heavily concentrated in core cities, and 39 of the 42 core city areas are situated inland. London alone is home to over 40 universities and HE institutions, plus numerous smaller providers, while half of the 18 rural villages in our study have only one or two universities – and the other half have none. This uneven distribution underscores how profoundly that where you live can shape whether higher education feels accessible. That said, it is not possible to say the extent to which the level of higher education provision or its supply affects the demand for it.

The limits of attainment and provider distribution in explaining disparities in HE participation underline the need for education policy that truly takes place into account. Effective approaches must go beyond national and regional averages, and at times operate at a finer level of granularity than broad place labels like ‘rural’ or ‘coastal’ can capture. Low participation is not confined neatly to rural villages or seaside towns, nor does urban location in itself guarantee access. In 2022/23, for example, the local authority area with the second lowest FSM higher education progression rate nationally was South Gloucestershire, an urban core city area. Places that appear to have similar characteristics can also experience vastly different outcomes: for instance, Oldham and Blackpool are both large towns located just over 50 miles apart, yet FSM progression rates stood at 36.2 percent in Oldham compared to just 16.2 percent in Blackpool.

These contrasts highlight why widening participation policy and efforts must engage with local conditions in a more nuanced way. Factors such as transport connectivity, the availability of part-time or flexible study, alignment with local labour markets, cultural expectations around higher education, and the strength of local support networks all shape whether HE feels achievable. It is the combination of structural, logistical and social factors that shape whether HE is genuinely within reach. Without attention to these finer-grained dynamics, place-based policy risks remaining too blunt to reach the communities most in need.

Breaking the postcode lottery

Since our report was published, the latest ‘Widening Participation in Higher Education’ data, covering up to 2023/24, have become available. Patterns of disparities in FSM higher education participation between different types of places in England have remained unchanged. And as shown in Diagram 2, gaps between different types of places have continued to grow over the past decade, under a widening participation approach that emphasises individual institutions over the collaborative, place-based, cross-sector strategy previously used.

Diagram 2: Gaps in average FSM higher education participation rates between different types of places in 2013/14 and 2023/24

It is therefore welcome that the government has begun to acknowledge these challenges. Its Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper commits to addressing higher education cold spots, improving understanding of local supply and demand, and tackling systemic barriers faced by disadvantaged learners. The creation of a Higher Education Access and Participation Task and Finish Group focused on tackling regional gaps and barriers across the student journey is a positive step in this direction, and one of our report’s authors, Professor Graeme Atherton, is sitting on the group.

However, recognition must translate into delivery. Our report sets out key recommendations, including setting local education participation targets as part of the government’s devolution strategy, auditing post-16 provision by place, and shifting the focus of widening access strategy from individual providers’ approach to local participation outcomes.

The evidence is clear: without a place-sensitive approach, existing gaps in HE participation will continue to widen. The closure of the University of Essex’s Southend campus illustrates what is at stake. If place continues to dictate access to higher education, individuals and the communities they call home risk being shut out, not just from higher education, but from the opportunities, skills and futures it makes possible.

Frances Sit is Research and Policy Officer at the Ruskin Institute for Social Equity (RISE), which produces policy-relevant research related to inequality in the UK and focuses particularly on place-based inequality, education and skills, work/labour market and the role of business. Frances supports RISE’s policy and research initiatives and coordinates the planning, promotion and delivery of its events. Previously, she served as the Policy and Communications Officer at the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), the UK’s professional organisation supporting those involved in widening access to higher education. Before that, Frances worked as a journalist, reporting on education, politics, social movements.

Professor Graeme Atherton is Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Regional Engagement at the University of West London, Vice-Principal of Ruskin College, Oxford and the Director of the World Access to Higher Education Network (WAHEN). He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Trinity College Oxford and has been working in the field of education research and management since 1995. An international leader and researcher in access to higher education and social mobility, Graeme has produced over 200 conference papers and publications, led regional, national and international initiatives to increase opportunity in higher education and frequently comments on social mobility and education in the UK and internationally. He founded AccessHE and the National Education Opportunities Network (NEON), and now leads the Ruskin Institute for Social Equity (RISE).


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Let them eat data: education, widening participation and the digital divide

by Alex Blower and Nik Marsdin

The quest for an answer

As an education sector we like answers, answers for everything, right or wrong. Sometimes we’re more concerned with arriving at an answer, than we are with ensuring it tackles the issue addressed by the question.

Widening HE participation is led by policy that dictates which answers we provide to what questions and to whom. All too often this leads to practitioners scrambling for answers to questions which are ill fitting to the issue at hand, or looking for a quick solution in such haste that we forget to read the question properly.

The COVID-19 pandemic has once again laid bare the stark inequality faced by children and young people in our education system. With it has been an influx of new questions from policy makers, and answers from across the political and educational spectrum.

A magic ‘thing’

More often than not, answers to these questions will comprise a ‘thing’. Governments like tangible objects like mentoring, tutoring, longer days, boot camps and shiny new academies. All of which align to the good old fashioned ‘fake it till you make it’ meritocratic ideal. For the last 40 years the Government has shied away from recognising, let alone addressing, embedded structural inequality from birth. It’s difficult, it’s complicated, and it can’t readily be answered in a tweet or a soundbite from a 6pm press conference.

The undesirable implications of a search for an ‘oven ready’ answer can be seen in the digital divide. A stark example of what access to the internet means for the haves and have-nots of the technological age.

‘So, the reason young people are experiencing extreme inequality and not becoming educationally successful, is because they don’t have enough access to technological things?’

‘What we need is a nice solid technological thing we can pin our hopes on…’

‘Laptops for everyone!’

Well, (and I suspect some voices in the back know what’s coming) access to technology alone isn’t the answer, in the same way that a pencil isn’t the answer to teaching a child to write.

Technology is a thing, a conduit, a piece of equipment that, if used right, can facilitate a learning gain. As professionals working to widen HE participation, we need to challenge these ‘oven ready answers’. Especially if they seem misguided or, dare I say it woefully ignorant of the challenges working-class communities face.

After distribution of the devices, online engagement didn’t change

Lancaster University developed the ‘Connecting Kids’ project during the first wave of COVID-19, as a direct response to calls for help by local secondary schools. The project achieved what it set out to in that it procured over 500 brand new laptops or Chromebooks, and free internet access for all recipients. Every child who fell outside of the Department for Education scheme who was without a suitable device in the home would now have one. Problem solved, right?

Not quite. Engagement in online learning environments prior to the DfE scheme and Connecting Kids initiative in years 8 and 9 was hovering at about 30% of students engaging daily, and 45% weekly. After the distribution of devices, engagement remained at nearly exactly the same level. Further inspection of the data from the telecom’s provider demonstrated that of the 500 mobile connections distributed, only 123 had been activated. Of those 123 only half were being regularly used. Of the 377 ‘unused’ sim and mi-fi packages around 200 showed ‘user error’ in connection status.

Again, this may come as no surprise to the seasoned professionals working with children and young people at the sharp end of structural inequality, but it turned out the ‘thing’ wasn’t the answer. Who would have thought it?

Understanding communities and providing resources

Fast forward 6 months and monthly interviews with participating school staff (part of the project evaluation, not yet complete) show that online engagement in one school is up to 92%. The laptops have played a valuable role in that. They have enabled access. What they haven’t done however, is understand and make allowances for the circumstances of children, young people and families. That has taken a commitment by the schools to provide holistic wrap around services in partnership with other organisations. It has included short courses on connecting to the internet, and provision of basic learning equipment such as pencils, paper, and pens. It has included the school day and timetable being replicated online, live feedback sessions with teachers and learning assistants, and drop-in sessions for parents and carers. Most importantly, it has included a recognition of the difference between home and school, and the impact it has on the education working-class of young people.

Back to policy and widening participation. If we are to make our work truly meaningful for young people, we must critically engage with a policy narrative which is built around a desire for quick fixes, soundbites and ‘oven ready things’. We owe it to the young people who are being hit hardest by this pandemic to take a step back and look at the wider barriers they face.

To do this we may need to reconceptualise what it means to support them into higher education. This starts with challenging much of the policy that is designed to improve access to higher education built upon a premise of individual deficit. The repetitive waving of magical policy wands to conjure up laptops, mentors and days out on campus will only serve to leave us with ever increasing numbers of students and families who are left out and disengaged. Numbers that will continue to rise unless we take the time to engage critically with the complex, numerous and damaging inequalities that working-class young people face.

Reshaping university outreach

This leaves us with something of a conundrum. As HE professionals, what on earth can we do about all of that? Is it our place to address an issue so vast, and so intimately tied to the turning cogs of government policy and societal inequality?

Well, if recent conversations pertaining to higher education’s civic purpose are anything to go by, the answer is undoubtedly yes. And we need to do it better. Within our mad scramble to do something to support young learners during the first, second, and now third national lockdown, our ‘thing’ has become online workshops.

For many of us the ramifications of the digital divide have been acknowledged, but we have shied away from them in work to widen HE participation. We’ve kept doing what we’ve always done, but switched to a model of online delivery which restricts who has the ability to access the content. Can we honestly say, given the disparity in digital participation amongst the most and least affluent groups, that this is the right answer to the question?

Rather than an online workshop series on ‘choosing universities’, would our time and resource be better spent by organising student ambassadors from computing subjects to staff a freephone helpline supporting young people in the community to get online? Could we distribute workbooks with local newspapers? Could we, as they did at Lancaster, work in partnership with other local and national organisations to offer more holistic support, support which ensures that as many students are able to participate in education digitally as possible?

For us, the answer is yes. Yes we should. And we can start by meaningfully engaging with the communities our universities serve. By taking the time to properly listen and understand the questions before working with those communities to provide an answer.

Currently based at the University of Portsmouth, Dr Alex Blower has worked as a professional in widening access to Higher Education for the last decade. Having completed his doctoral research in education and inequality last year, Alex’s research interests focus around class, masculinity and higher education participation. Follow Alex via @EduDetective on twitter.

Nik Marsdin is currently lead for the Morecambe Bay Curriculum (part of the Eden North Project) at Lancaster University. Nik worked in children’s social care, youth justice and community provision for 12 years prior to moving into HE.  Research interests are widening participation, school exclusion, transitions in education and alternative provision. Follow Nik via @MarsdinNik on Twitter.


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Higher Education and Desistance from Offending

by Debbie Jones and Mark Jones

It is often the case that those entrenched in patterns of offending find it difficult to stop due to stigma, discrimination and other structural issues limiting opportunities to bolster aspiration (Ministry of Justice, 2010; Shapland and Bottoms, 2011). Several studies have concluded that studying within Higher Education (HE) can be a significant ‘hook for change’ offering development of personal agency and widening positive social networks, key factors towards desistance (Lockwood et al, 2012; Runell, 2017).

Yet, despite widening access to HE being a global endeavour (Evans et al, 2017), the Prison Education Trust (2017) highlight that HE can feel unwelcoming for those with a criminal record. Evans et al (2017) found that, despite a drive to widen participation and access to HE in Wales, the internal culture and narrative can become ‘entangled, reinforcing the status quo at the expense of developing non-traditional student participation such as adult learners.

This blog shares our research carried out in Swansea, Wales which was funded by the Society for Research into Higher Education. The project explored the aspirations, barriers, and challenges for those at risk of offending to study in HE and considered what might be needed to support the desire to desist from offending within the context of a HE setting. The data collection phase consisted of two engagement events: one for those that had offended or were at risk of offending and were members of our partner and host organisation ‘The Hub’ (n = 16), and the other with practitioners who worked with people at risk including two participants who were also studying at Higher Education and had offended (n = 10).

We adopted a Pictorial Narrative Approach as a data collection tool and community engagement activity (Glaw et al, 2017). We will talk more about the Pictorial Approach and share some of the visual data in a forthcoming blog but for now, we want to share some of the key findings from the project.

It was clear from the data that aspirations, short and long term, varied but there was a common desire to ‘get back on track’. This was articulated as achieving better mental health and well-being which was seen as a ‘daily struggle’, securing employment, with some of the group wanting to use their own experiences to help others, and the development of positive family ties and relationships.  Such aspirations have been identified as key drivers to desistance (McNeill 2019) and might be the necessary pre-requisites before any consideration can be given to embarking on higher education.

However, one of the more concerning factors from the data was the impact of previous education. 12 participants reported negative educational experiences, feeling like a ‘lost soul swimming in a fish bowl’. Many recounted negative learning experiences within the classroom such as, ‘getting the answers wrong’ and being ‘told off’ leading to feelings of embarrassment and intimidation. A majority of participants identified other forms of educational exclusion such as learning difficulties and bullying. Such experiences left the participants with feelings of alienation and resentment of the whole education sector. For participants who had been to prison it was often ‘the beginning of their education’ where they found hope and aspiration. Prison education was viewed as offering opportunity to develop basic skills such as reading and writing and for one participant it offered the chance to pursue a higher level of education at university on release from prison.

In terms of barriers and challenges to accessing HE, most of the participants were sceptical of HE and identified university as marketing itself as a vehicle for gaining employment but really ‘just wanted the money.’ Three of the participants in the first group had attended university and felt the level of debt acquired in the pursuit of a degree was excessive with no guarantees that it would lead to a job. Indeed, funding of a degree was a perceived as an insurmountable barrier for the group. All participants from the first group were claiming benefits and felt university was out of reach because of the trade-off between state support and the notion of ‘degree debts’. Even something as simple as paying for public transport to get to university was seen as problematic.

There was recognition however that university could help people gain confidence and improve their well-being if the issue of exclusion/rejection for previous offending could be addressed. One participant reported, ‘I applied for university but they rejected me because of my conviction, only drink related offences mind you, but they rejected me anyway but even when I walk across the campus now I feel proud and it makes me walk with my head held high – the university has a good vibe about it’.

Indeed, there was a strong sense of despondency amongst the group who felt their convictions would prevent them from going to university. One participant reported that he had been told that he needed to be ‘clean from drugs for two years before I can start doing courses, it’s really fucking hard’. Another participant articulated the views of the group when he said, ‘if you have the money they’ll take you but not if you have a conviction’.

The findings from this pilot study suggest that HE can offer people who have offended, or are at risk of offending, the opportunity to develop positive personal agency. However, for that to happen universities need to reconfigure how HE is delivered in the truest sense of widening access. This might include: the delivery of HE in partnership with prisons and existing community rehabilitation programmes to overcome issue of stigma and increase confidence; training for student services to meet needs of those students with a criminal record or at risk of offending; and, better outreach and marketing of HE and student loan systems to those at risk of offending. You can read the full report on the project at http://www.srhe.ac.uk/downloads/reports-2018/JONESdebbiemarkReport.pdf

Debbie Jones is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Director for Undergraduate Studies, Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Law, Swansea University. Deborah.a.jones@swansea.ac.uk, Twitter @debjonesccjc.

Mark Jones was an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Adult and Continuing Education at Swansea University at the time of the research and is now Director at Higher Plain Research and Education. HigherPlainResearchEducation@gmail.com Twitter @A_HigherPlain. Our lead partner in this research is The hub in Swansea. Debbie and Mark are grateful to SRHE for funding the project.

References

Evans, C, Rees, G, Taylor, C, and Wright, C (2017) ‘Widening Access to Higher Education: The Reproduction of University Hierarchies Through Policy Enactment’ Journal of Education Policy, 34(1): 101-116

Glaw, X, Inder, K, Kable, A, and Hazelton, M (2017) ‘Visual Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Autophotography and Photo Elicitation Applied to Mental Health Research’ International Journal of Qualitative Methods 16: 1-8

Lockwood, S, Nally, J, Ho, T, and Knutson, K (2012) ‘The Effect of Correctional Education on Postrelease Employment and Recidivism: A 5-Year Follow-Up Study in the State of Indiana’ Crime and Delinquency, 58(3): 380-396

McNeill, F (2019) Rehabilitation, Corrections and Society Retrieved July 01, 2019, from http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/159625/7/159625.pdf

Ministry of Justice (2010) Understanding Desistance from Crime. Available at: http://www.safeground.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Desistance-Fact-Sheet.pdf

Prison Education Trust (2017) To be Truly Inclusive, Universities Must Help Prisoners Feel They Belong. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/aug/16/to-be-truly-inclusive-universities-must-help-prisoners-feel-they-belong

Runell, LL (2017) ‘Identifying Desistance Pathways in a Higher Education Program for Formerly Incarcerated Individuals’ International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 61(8): 894-918

Shapland, J, and Bottoms, A (2011) ‘Reflections on social values, offending and desistance among young adult recidivists’ Punishment & Society 13(3): 256–282 https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474511404334