Skidmore: top institutions must do more to widen access

The UK’s most selective universities need to be “more ambitious” in making lower offers to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, the universities minister has said.

In a 15 July speech at Birkbeck, University of London, Chris Skidmore said that inclusion needed to be “at the heart of all institutional policy”, in order to put “an end to the myth that university is only for a certain type of person, from a certain type of background”.

As part of this, he said, universities should think again about contextual admissions, such as lowering the grades some students need to obtain to be accepted, in order to reflect their individual circumstances.