\n<\/p>\n
Young people from deprived families in inner London are going to university at a greater rate than children in other parts of England, even as enthusiasm for higher education has levelled off nationally.<\/p>\n
More than 50% of inner London\u2019s pupils on free school meals (FSM) had progressed to higher education by age 19 in 2023-24, compared with fewer than 46% of young people from all backgrounds, and below 20% for pupils on FSM living in a quarter of local authorities outside London.<\/p>\n
One in 10 of the inner London pupils gained places at selective universities such as those in the Russell Group, double the rate for young people on FSM from elsewhere in England.<\/p>\n
Prof Graeme Atherton, an associate pro-vice-chancellor at the University of West London and an expert in access to higher education, said the extraordinary success of the inner London pupils was due to a combination of factors.<\/p>\n
\u201cGCSE attainment rates have been higher in London, and have been for a long time, so that drives participation,\u201d Atherton said. \u201cThere\u2019s a greater proclivity, that you can see in some of the data, for those from non-white backgrounds to enter higher education whatever grades they get \u2013 and the majority of young people in inner London are non-white. And there\u2019s the proximity of higher education institutions, there\u2019s lots of them in inner London \u2026 There\u2019s more universities on your doorstep there.<\/p>\n
\u201cPut that all together and you\u2019ve got a combination that leads to higher participation, and that\u2019s across the board. But what\u2019s also interesting is the difference between inner and outer London, where the participation rate isn\u2019t so high. So maybe it\u2019s also something about the critical mass of young people from similar backgrounds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sarah Hannafin, the head of policy at the National Association of Head Teachers, said: \u201cChildren\u2019s educational attainment and life chances should not be constrained by their family\u2019s means or where they live.\u201d<\/p>\n
The detailed statistics from the Department for Education tracked pupils eligible for FSM at age 15 or younger to age 19, and showed that the \u201cparticipation gap\u201d between young people from deprived backgrounds and their better-off peers had shrunk, boosted by the performance of those from London.<\/p>\n
In particular, the gap narrowed between FSM eligible pupils and others attending \u201chigh tariff\u201d universities requiring top A-level grades. But the national figures showed waning enrolments in 2023-24, which Atherton described as \u201cstagnant\u201d nationally, after record levels of enrolments during the Covid pandemic.<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n
Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what\u2019s happening and why it matters<\/p>\n
Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n He said: \u201cWe\u2019re seeing more evidence of student poverty. These young people, aged 17 or 18, they have friends, they have social media, they know what the student experience is like, and that could be off-putting. But overall there\u2019s still solid demand, with regional differences.\u201d<\/p>\n Among students who took A-levels at age 17, 80.6% had gone on to university or other higher education by age 19, a drop of more than two percentage points compared with 2022-23. Among all state school pupils at age 15, the progression rate by age 19 decreased from 46.9% to 45.8% in 2023-24.<\/p>\n The biggest exception was among black pupils, where progression to university rose to 63.3% \u2013 the biggest increase among any ethnic group since 2009, and the only group to have increased year on year. White pupils were the least likely to progress to higher education by age 19, at 40.5%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Young people from deprived families in inner London are going to university at a greater rate than children in other parts of England, even as enthusiasm for higher education has levelled off nationally. More than 50% of inner London\u2019s pupils on free school meals (FSM) had progressed to higher education by age 19 in 2023-24,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[3874,1111,533,1661,1604,6023,583,871,781],"class_list":{"0":"post-13304","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-access","9":"tag-data","10":"tag-free","11":"tag-london","12":"tag-majority","13":"tag-meals","14":"tag-pupils","15":"tag-shows","16":"tag-university"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}