LSBU-led index shows how universities close the gap between poorer and privileged students
A new index developed by Professor Antony Moss, Pro Vice-Chancellor at London South Bank University (LSBU) Group, shows that some universities are closing the gap between poorer and more privileged students, but that most of the data needed to measure this is not public.
The Higher Education Value Add Index (HEVA) is set out in a report published today by higher education policy think tank The Post-18 Project.
Out of every 100 students who have never had free meals who make it into university, two-thirds of them will leave with a good degree. For those who did have free school meals, it is less than half.
That gap doesn’t appear at graduation, it accumulates: poorer students are less likely to get in, more likely to drop out in the first year, more likely to leave before final assessments, and less likely to get a good degree even when they do finish.
Currently, each of those gaps is measured separately, but a report published today by The Post-18 Project proposes a single measure of how well each university and college closes that gap for the students it chose to admit.
In the index, Professor Moss puts together the data on who gets in, gets out, and with what, to create a score for an institution. A score of 1 means a provider’s gap matches the sector average. Higher is better; lower is worse.
Russell Group universities, post-92s, specialist arts colleges and further education colleges all appear among the strongest performers. There is no clear pattern by type of institution and none by region. Prestige and geography, on this evidence, have little to do with it.
But of the 346 registered higher education providers, more than 250 cannot currently be awarded an index – because not enough of their data is public.
Why HEVA is needed
Ministers have already asked for something like HEVA. The Post-16 Education and Skills White Paper committed the government to develop, with the Office for Students, a way of measuring progress in higher education “as Progress 8 has done in schools”.
HEVA is an answer to that commitment, with one important departure: it doesn’t use prior attainment. Universities select on A-level grades on purpose. A measure that rewarded students for beating their predicted grades would flatter the least selective institutions and make it almost impossible for the most selective ever to add value at all.
Why we cannot calculate a score for all providers
There are 346 registered higher education providers in England. HEVA can be calculated for 87 of them. For the rest, the Office for Students suppresses the underlying figures – in most cases because a provider has fewer than 23 free-school-meal students in a cohort, though a handful are missing just one stage of the student journey and nothing else.
What the modelling shows
Of the 87, 75 do better than the sector average. That is 86 per cent, and those 87 institutions teach three-quarters of all free-school-meal entrants. The arithmetic only works one way: the providers that can’t be measured must, taken together, be doing worse.
Current regulation looks at each stage of the journey on its own. A university can lose a large share of its poorer students in year one and still report a small attainment gap, because the gap is only measured among the students who stayed. HEVA carries every entrant all the way through – the same logic clinical trials use when they count everyone who began a treatment, not just those who finished it.
The report asks the Office for Students to calculate the index for every provider, using data it already holds but does not publish.
Professor Moss said: “We’ve become very good at measuring who gets into university. We are far less good at measuring who gets out of it well. HEVA puts that in one number, for the students each institution chose to admit – and what it shows is that all kinds of universities and colleges are getting this right. None of them are doing it by accident.”
Professor John Blake, Director of The Post-18 Project and formerly Director for Fair Access and Participation at the Office for Students, said: “The government asked for a Progress 8 for universities, so we built one which draws on the regulator’s own published data. But the regulator’s own rules mean three-quarters of the sector can’t be publicly scored on it – the data is there, and the regulator could calculate a result for all HE providers right now. The question now is whether policymakers and providers really want to know the results.”
Read Happily HEVA After: A new value add framework for higher education. The full provider data set is released with it, together with a search tool that lets any English provider find its index – or see exactly which figure is missing.