Universities need to coordinate better, rather than working in silos, to ensure they are more accessible to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, a conference has heard.

Speaking at an event hosted by social mobility charity The Sutton Trust, Sally Mapstone, principal and vice-chancellor of the University of St Andrews, argued that cross-university collaboration has resulted in an increase in the number of students from disadvantaged backgrounds attending university in Scotland.

She described how Scottish universities have been working together to widen access for disadvantaged students, following the publication of a major report into access opportunities to higher education in 2016.

She said all 18 of Scotland’s universities have since adopted “a common language” across their communications to students, in a bid to make this more consistent and accessible for students who do not have a family history of higher education.

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“One of the things that we were very conscious of was that applicants landing on universities’ admissions pages were finding very different sets of parlance and terms. So we set about actually regularising the language that we all utilised,” she explained.

“It’s not perfect but it’s a big step forward,” she said, adding that Scotland now has a system that “is looking to treat equity as a shared responsibility, rather than institutional competition”.

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Mapstone said that the effective cap on student numbers, set by the Scottish government every year, may make such coordination easier in Scotland but she added that England's “marketised model disperses accountability” for widening access, where Scotland has “been able to align policy instruments behind widening access”.

There needs to be a “multi-pronged approach” to widening access, she said, “not just within institutions, but ideally, if you can do it, across institutions”.

Graeme Atherton, associate pro vice-chancellor for regional engagement at the University of West London and vice-principal of Ruskin College, warned that institutions and governments can become stuck in certain approaches to tackling access issues, and urged universities to look globally at how other institutions are tackling these problems.

“If you do something for a long time, you have a way of looking at things, and parameters around your thinking. You don’t do it deliberately. It’s just what you do,” he said. 

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“It’s worthwhile thinking outside that context, and see commonalities and things that challenge your thinking as well. It’s worth knowing that there’s different ways of doing things across the world,” he told the event, organised in partnership with the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Atherton said “stability” was a consistent trait in global access initiatives but was something that “hasn’t been as well done in England”. Overall, he believed “stability, targets, and collaboration” are important for ensuring their success. 

For Paul Reville, the Francis Keppel professor of practice of educational policy and administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, declining social mobility in education and wider society was “responsible for some of the divisive politics in our country right now”. 

“I think this work has every bit to do with restoring the foundation of democracy and so it’s very urgent work,” he said. 

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juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com