Consultation on the Report on Widening Access

5. The report presents statistics about Scottish-domiciled students across a range of widening access groups, including SIMD domicile, sex, ethnicity, disability, care experience and age, at the sector level for colleges and universities in Scotland. These breakdowns cover entrants, qualifiers, university retention rates, college student outcomes, graduate outcomes destinations, college leaver destinations, and university staffing. The university data is collected in HESA returns by Jisc, including graduate outcomes survey data. College sector data is collected by SFC via the Further Education Statistics (FES) return and College Leaver Destinations (CLD) return.
6. The publication also reports figures relating to the Commission on Widening Access (CoWA) targets and receives strong sector, stakeholder and press interest for this reason. More details on the background to the CoWA targets are provided below:
   1. In September 2015, the then First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon MSP, outlined a commitment that a child born today in one of our most deprived communities should have no lesser chance of entering higher education than a child born in one of our least deprived, and a long-term goal that 20% of university entrants come from the most disadvantaged 20% of society.
   2. This led to a Commission on Widening Access being set up to identify how to deliver that remit. One of the outcomes of this Commission was that the Scottish Government and SFC implement a set of targets to drive forward the delivery of equal access in Scotland including a commitment that by 2030, students from the 20% most deprived backgrounds should represent 20% of entrants to higher education and that equality of access should be seen in both the college sector and the university sector.

7. The RoWA publication has not been reviewed for several years. The last formal consultation took place in 2017 after the Commission was set up in 2015. In 2019, an informal call for feedback was issued to stakeholder groups. Since then, the data needs of the sector have evolved. A consultation gives SFC the opportunity to make substantive improvements to the publication whilst ensuring it meets the needs of key stakeholders.
8. More sophisticated data reporting tools are now available which can help readers to explore and understand the statistics. Over time we intend to replace the publication’s Excel background tables with an interactive Power BI dashboard, which will be published alongside the main report. This will enable readers to navigate the data much more quickly and easily for various student groups, while minimising duplication of charts and tables.

9. This consultation is focused on what and how data is presented in the RoWA. The following are out of scope of this consultation:
   1. Changing the CoWA targets or its policies.
   2. How we measure or define articulation for reporting purposes. Universities Scotland and Colleges Scotland are currently running a consultation on revising these definitions. The outcomes from this will be reviewed as part of the consultation for SFC’s new ‘student journeys’ publication.
   3. Scottish Government are investigating development of a Unique Learner Number and identifying students who have been receipt of free school meals. These are out of scope for this consultation.

10. The following table provides a set of proposed changes that we are looking for feedback on and could make for the upcoming publication:

11. At present, university retention figures are derived from a dataset which Jisc supply to SFC, on the same basis as the now deprecated UK Performance Indicators. This dataset allows SFC to calculate the number and proportion of university undergraduate entrants retained into the next academic session. This includes those who entered directly into year two or year three of a programme (for example via articulation) and were retained into the next year.^[1]
12. However, the dataset does not allow SFC to calculate retention rates beyond entrants continuing into year two. Retention beyond year two is important for understanding the longer-term study outcomes of widening access students.
13. SFC is currently developing a record matching process which will allow us to calculate these more advanced and longer-term retention measures. It will also enable SFC to produce the current retention metric in-house and remove our reliance on Jisc producing it for SFC, enabling us greater control of publication timelines.
14. We plan to continue to report retention using the Jisc non-continuation calculation in our next RoWA publication, which is scheduled for release in summer 2026. However, we plan to, at some point, either fully or partially move retention reporting from the RoWA to a new ‘student journeys’ publication. This has provisionally been given verbal support from stakeholders in Education Analytical Services at Scottish Government and the Commissioner for Fair Access. We plan to run a separate consultation later in 2026 to get sector feedback on the content of this new publication.
15. We are working with Jisc to start collecting data on a contextual admissions flag in the HESA returns, potentially from the 2027-28 academic year. We plan to incorporate this reporting in the Report on Widening Access when that data becomes available. A separate briefing note will be sent to the sector on this in late January or early February 2026.

^[1] Students who qualify having entered university the year before are also counted as retained. This may include first degree qualifiers who transferred from a diploma course, or students who qualified with an ‘other undergraduate’ level qualification.

16. The response form also contains questions looking to gauge feedback on:
    1. Limiting tables and chart time series to 10 years, with the exception of CoWA tables.
    2. Introducing disaggregation by undergraduate qualifications types, such as integrated masters, first degree with honours, Graduate Apprenticeship, HNC, etc.
    3. The level of interest in reporting degree outcome classifications (first, upper-second class, etc.)
    4. The level of interest in adding reporting on student remoteness and rurality as two separate entities.

Responses should be supplied by completing the online form.

Please note that we are subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and would, therefore, have to consider any request under the Act for information relating to responses made to this consultation exercise. We will make all responses available publicly. If you ask for your response not to be published. You should clearly mark any parts of your response that you wish to be treated as confidential, subject to the Freedom of Information Act.