Dear Sir
Ann Widdecombe demonstrates a limited awareness of the huge results that can be secured from outreach work in schools aimed at encouraging young people from low income backgrounds to consider higher education [Here's how to get children from poor families into top universities, 2 July 2014].
Her recipe for change is to "forget outreach” and instead lead a charge for more grammar schools, yet here in Birmingham this is a deeply simplistic analyses. We are making great strides in widening access, persisting in Aimhigher work across the West Midlands despite the Government's decision in 2011 to pull central funding for this initiative.
The results are clear. More than half the young people from areas where higher education participation is low, who take part in Aimhigher activity, go on to apply for university. This contrasts sharply with the recent Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission's research which concluded that that fewer young people from disadvantaged areas in England were applying to university "than ever before".
Together with our counterparts in colleges and universities across the region, we provide a range of activities for young people aged 14-17 in around 70 schools, working with 800 young people on an intensive basis – 80 per cent of whom are considered as coming from a deprived background.
Showing young people what higher education can do for them is crucial and transformative, especially if the subject doesn’t ever figure in conversations at home. For Ms Widdecombe to so casually dismiss the merits of “outreach” does a disservice to the work that many of us do every day and to the young people who stand to benefit.
Professor Bashir Makhoul
Pro Vice Chancellor
Birmingham City University
