Action on Access Summit – Professor Ed Byrne’s speech
10.11.15
Widening participation and student success:
An institutional perspective on strategic issues facing universities in England

Good morning. I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to address you, so soon after the launch of
a Green Paper that has huge implications to the future of higher education in England.

It’s a really opportune moment to gather together so many of the leading practitioners and experts in
the sphere of widening participation, as the agenda you help to advance is clearly one of the hotbutton issues in the Green paper.

I will look to share some of my own thoughts on the Green Paper, and in particular the Teaching
Excellence Framework and the very clear step change in the onus placed on social mobility as a
priority in higher education.

I’ve also been asked to touch on how King’s, as a highly selective university operating in the heart
of London, is already responding, and how we will look to respond in future, to the challenge of
widening participation and helping students from under-represented and disadvantaged
backgrounds reach their full potential.
Real ambition needs to be matched with the right language and the right expertise at
institutional and national level

Let me begin by saying that in my view a university can’t be said to be fulfilling its mission to spread
knowledge and strengthen society if it doesn’t take widening participation seriously and look to
embed this at the heart of its strategy.
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Action on Access Summit – Professor Ed Byrne’s speech
10.11.15

In my years of working in senior leadership roles I’ve consistently found the widening participation
agenda to be one of the biggest, fast-moving and complex areas of whole-university change
management to grapple with.

It’s also one of the most critically important issue areas for a university to get right. Universities, in
my view, should always aspire to be ladders of opportunity for bright people to access knowledge
and develop skills that ready them to succeed in all aspects of their life, regardless of background.

It was heartening to see social mobility appear in the title of the Green Paper, but I think we have to
keep in mind the need to address or tackle underlying socio-economic inequalities and conscious
and unconscious bias really matters.

I’m very encouraged by the Government’s pledge in the Green Paper to rapidly convene a new
national ministerial advisory group on social mobility to help drive forward progress in the coming
years.

In my mind this is a clear statement of intent from Minister for Universities and Science, Jo Johnson,
to get the sector focused on the 2020 targets for improvements in access to university by WP
students and BME student attainment outcomes. But we should also see this advisory group as a
conduit for universities and education charities to more directly and regularly get their views across
on what additional policies and actions the government should be looking to advance and what
resources are needed.

I’m pleased that Universities UK will be playing a key role in helping establish the group, and I hope
they won’t mind me saying that I think in addition to vice-chancellors or pro-vice chancellors, there
should be representation on the advisory group by experienced WP department directors who of
course have a much richer in-depth understanding of the day-to-day frontline challenges.
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Action on Access Summit – Professor Ed Byrne’s speech
10.11.15
Engaging with the Teaching Excellence Framework

Regarding the Green paper, today I am going to focus on my reaction to TEF and the other
developments, rather than re-capping what’s in the Green paper exhaustively.

My first key contention is that the sector should see the Teaching Excellence Framework as an
opportunity that we should pro-actively shape, not a challenge or threat to be mitigated or watered
down. I see it as an opportunity because, as the Minister says, it has the potential to help ensure the
quality of teaching is seen at all universities to be as important an issue of strategic management
focus as improvements to the quality of the university’s research base.

That’s not to say there isn’t need for a full and rigorous debate about what precisely makes up the
basket of measures that TEF Level judgments will be informed by. In particular I would say a great
deal of work will need to be done to ensure metrics to look at value added or learning gain are
robust and contextualised.

But universities, and the widening participation and equality and diversity practitioner communities
in particular, should see TEF as a development to be approached in a positive light, with a
constructive mindset to try and design a TEF that really adds value and gives students and
employers a meaningful picture.

The Widening Participation community in my view should be one of the key voices around the table
as the detailed design of the TEF gets underway. We need to ensure that any metrics in the TEF
that specifically relate to the quality of teaching, retention and progression of WP students are
interlaced with the objectives set out in Access Agreements.
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Action on Access Summit – Professor Ed Byrne’s speech
10.11.15
The Office for Students and major changes in the funding landscape

Turning to other big issues, the plans to replace HEFCE and OFFA with an Office for Students are
obviously extremely significant and throw up many issues and questions for the sector that will need
to be debated.

I would just say at the outset that I think the work HEFCE and OFFA have been doing in recent
years to promote a more collaborative and full lifecycle approach to widening participation really
deserves to be commended.

Professor Les Ebdon in particular has done a great deal to ensure universities genuinely embrace
the need for a full life cycle approach and I hope he remains in role, and that his team are given the
resources they need within the Office for Students to continue their important work.

I don’t want to pre-empt an internal discussion with colleagues at King’s about what our approach
on this question will be, but I will say that if BIS is to take this formula allocation responsibility
onwards, there will need to be measures in place to ensure that officials shaping the allocations
have real insight and exposure to the frontline issues they affect.

There would need to be some form of consultative oversight process involving university
representatives to ensure year-on-year changes don’t undermine the financial health of some parts
of the sector at the expense of others in pursuit of newly emerging priorities. I’ve always felt HEFCE
have done an excellent job in balancing and translating competing priorities into sustainable
financial settlements for the sector.
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Action on Access Summit – Professor Ed Byrne’s speech
10.11.15

We obviously don’t know as of yet what the outcome will be, but even if efficiencies in the short term
are found in other areas of the HE budget, it’s going to be essential over the next 5 years, as the
Government looks to move from deficit to structural surplus, to find ways to really demonstrate the
tremendous added value that public investment in widening participation delivers.

This doesn’t just mean Universities UK and your mission groups producing data-rich publications, it
means really getting ministers and politicians engaged and excited with the work you’re doing at the
frontline. As a sector, we’re being challenged by politicians to really up our game in terms of helping
widen access and support all our students to reach their full potential – in turn we should be actively
knocking on their doors and asking them to come and see what we’re doing.

While the PGT loans of up to £10,000 is a positive development, it is important not to be
complacent. It must not merely help lighten the up-front cost for affluent students, but actually serve
as a mechanism for greater social mobility. Also, in future we should campaign to incrementally
extend PGT loans to those over the age of 30.

Universities like King’s that benefited from the 2014/15 pilot postgraduate bursary schemes have
already had an opportunity to test a range of outreach and support measures to help boost
postgraduate participation. Disseminating and absorbing key learnings from these pilots and the
body of research evidence they have generated will be important as the new loan pool comes on
stream.
How King’s is responding – effective support across the life cycle

I’m now going to focus more on King’s and how we’re approaching the outreach, financial support
and student success elements of an effective lifecycle approach, in the context of signposting some
of the thematic areas where I think policymakers will be pushing universities to be more imaginative
in the years ahead.
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Action on Access Summit – Professor Ed Byrne’s speech
10.11.15
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In 2014/15 we invested just over £8.7 million pounds in outreach, study support and student
financial support related activities. Like many universities, we’ve moved in recent years away from
offering fee waivers, to rebalance financial support towards bursaries, that give disadvantaged
student greater ability to meet the high living costs of being based in the capital.

I’m aware that OFFA is encouraging universities to consider reallocating a significantly greater
proportion of overall spend towards outreach but at present, given the results of a recent survey of
students receiving bursaries at King’s, as well as the uncertainties thrown up by the changes to the
disabled students allowance and conversion of maintenance grants into maintenance loans, we’ve
made a decision to hold steady the level of funding we provide for bursaries.

I think in the next few years we can expect to see the Office for Students and the Government
challenging universities to give a much clearer account of what we are doing to narrow persistent
attainment and progression gaps through more inclusive approaches to teaching and learning and
student experience.

Already at King’s we launched in the spring of 2014 a long term research and transformation project
to identify practical actions to address troubling gaps in the student attainment of some of our Black
and Minority Ethnic undergraduates and postgraduates relative to broader average performance in
their study cohort.

Our Director of Widening Participation, Anne-Marie Canning, is a relentless innovator and real
champion of the full life-cycle approach at King’s. During her time at King’s she’s helped refocus
some of our student financial support towards a dedicated programme to help WP students with the
costs of taking up Study Abroad places as part of their undergraduate studies.
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Action on Access Summit – Professor Ed Byrne’s speech
10.11.15

She’s also now working on a project with the Cabinet Office’s Behavioral Insights Team to look at
what can be done to help WP students more readily access the full range of services available to
them such as research and study skills programmes provided by the university, accredited
internships, careers fairs and employability workshops and experiential learning opportunities.

We’re also quite fortunate to have a number of leading academic researchers at King’s, such as Dr.
Anna Mountford-Zimdars, who are well versed in the learning gain and differential outcomes
research arena. We will be drawing on their insight greatly.

I think many other universities will also be stepping up activity in this sphere over the next few years
and I would strongly encourage the sector to share research evidence and best practice.
How King’s is responding – Outreach and access to the professions

At King’s, we have a clear strategic underpinning for our OFFA agreement and all our widening
participation initiatives. This internal articulation of our commitment and approach is key to making
faster progress in opening up our university.

With respect to outreach, I’m extremely proud of our flagship post-16 outreach K+ scheme, which
over the course of 2 years provides over 550 Year 12s and 13s participants with academic masterclasses, mentoring support, cultural visits, practical advice on applying universities, and additional
consideration by the King’s admissions service. We now receive around 1,000 applications each
year for the 280 Year 12 entry-point places.

This September we’ve also launched a new outreach programme involving carefully selected
schools and Key Stage 3 pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds in Lambeth, Southwark and
Westminster.
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Action on Access Summit – Professor Ed Byrne’s speech
10.11.15

The King’s Scholars programme will support students across Year 7 to Year 9 in thinking about their
educational journey and the choices they face in terms of qualifications. Initially the programme is
available to 300 Year 7 pupils across 14 schools; once the programme is fully on stream it will be
supporting around 900 secondary school pupils each year. What is novel about this scheme is the
way we have worked to involve multiple schools from the very outset in co-developing both the
vision and practical design for how the programme should run.

As well as running centralized programmes through the Widening Participation departments, we
also recognise that the academic community at King’s, and the Student Union, can play a really big
role. We provide funding for a dedicated post-holder in the KCL Student Union to work with student
societies on local educational outreach projects. We also provide a £100,000 WP Grant Fund for
academics and departments to apply for funding to run activities.

Finally, universities are being asked to do more to create better access pathways into the most
highly selective professions. King’s has been a sector leader for many years with respect to its
contexualised offer Extended Medical and Dentistry Degree programmes and tie-in bursary support.

We’re proud of these initiatives but I recognise that like all universities King’s needs to be more
ambitious across the piece with respect to increasing the support pathways into the most
competitive professions and graduate employer programmes. I’m hopeful we will see more multiuniversity initiatives, like Realising Opportunities, emerge in this space in the next few years.

In closing I’d just like to commend the WP sector on the work you’ve been doing to date and urge
you to continue to be innovative and pro-active in the years ahead. Concerted action will be needed
in a number of areas, but I know you’re up for the challenge. Thank you.
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