Article

HEFCE statement on WP funding

Funding for widening participation

Press reports today suggest there are some misunderstandings of the purpose of HEFCE’s funding for widening participation.

Our overall aim is to promote and provide the opportunity of successful participation in higher education to everyone who can benefit from it. This is vital for both social justice and economic competitiveness.

Our approach

We provide funding for widening participation to recognise the additional costs for institutions of recruiting and retaining able students who are less well prepared for higher education because of their circumstances. This funding does not provide a bonus to universities and colleges, nor any incentive to recruit one type of student over another. Rather, it may help to remove a disincentive for institutions to recruit some students who have the potential to benefit from higher education, but who may cost more to support. The circumstances of these students mean that they may need additional encouragement to apply or additional support once recruited in order to complete their studies. The funding is allocated only in respect of students who complete their year of study.

Additional costs

Additional costs may arise for institutions in three areas, which our funding approach recognises. These are:

• the costs institutions incur in outreach work, recruiting students from areas where the HE participation rates or HE qualification levels of residents are low. This includes close working partnerships with schools and further education colleges
• the costs of additional support to retain students who are at greater risk of not completing their studies (this might include costs of, for example, additional tuition or pastoral support)
• the additional costs of supporting disabled students.
  

We do not expect that our widening participation funding will necessarily meet in full all the additional costs that institutions face. However, institutions will also use funding from fees that they have committed through their access agreements with the Office for Fair Access (OFFA), to support additional outreach activities and provide bursaries and scholarships to students from low income backgrounds and other under-represented groups.

This year’s funding for WP

Funding for widening participation in 2008-09 will be £364 million, representing a 2.75 per cent increase on the previous year. There has been no change in our policy for distributing these funds. All of our recurrent funding for widening participation is driven by formula based on the numbers and profile of students. This is applied consistently and transparently. Institutions have an equal opportunity of accessing these funds, but the largest allocations will go to those institutions that face the greatest additional costs, given the types of students that they recruit.

This year we are using more up-to-date information on HE participation and qualification levels in census wards to calculate WP funding. There has also been a reduction in the number of fundable part-time students - mainly in continuing education - caused by the removal of funding for some students taking equivalent or lower qualifications to those they already hold. These changes affect institutions in different ways, but are designed to ensure that the funding better addresses the widening participation challenges of today.