Our response to the Office for Students ‘Call for Evidence: Regional Access Partnerships’

We welcome the opportunity to work together with the Office for Students (OfS) in designing a national collaborative outreach programme fit for the future and focused on widening access to higher education for learners.

The proposals centre around the establishment of new ‘regional access partnerships’, bringing together local partners such as higher education providers, schools, local organisations, and charities to collaboratively deliver access interventions. These partnerships would operate in much the same way as UniConnect but would rationalise the number, size and shape of regions to align with existing regional structures, such as local authorities and local skills improvement plans.

We have been calling for the establishment of a similar scheme in the form of a Tertiary Education Opportunity Fund, as described in our Blueprint, as an evolution of the UniConnect programme.

• We welcome the proposal to continue a national programme of collaborative outreach activity, building and learning from the proven effectiveness of UniConnect and previous programmes that came before it. Sustained and long-term investment in this activity will be essential to address inequality in regional participation in higher education and cold spots.
   
• In order to efficiently harness the collective power of universities to deliver for learners, it will be important to enhance collaboration across the wider education system. This will also improve the accessibility of pathways for learners. However, to effectively incentivise partnership working between institutions operating within a market, it will be vital that the regulator’s actions as well as tangible levers encourage the desired collaborative behaviour.
   
• Collaborating collectively in regions is important to ensure that local solutions are delivered to address local challenges. There is unlikely to be an appropriate one-size-fits-all approach to designating regions. It will be important for regions to be developed through direct engagement with local partners with a flexible approach considering existing local structures and partnerships, demographics of service users, and available resourcing.
   
• Linking access and outreach activity to skills strategies and the work of Skills England to address regional and national skills needs is an important step. However, this must be done with care to ensure that information, advice and guidance delivered to learners is linked to transparent information about graduate opportunities, enabling each individual to make informed choices that are right for them.