Why Some Students Deserve Special Treatment

By Deborah Bowman

Q: So what is St George’s official policy on widening participation?  A: That it is a priority and SGUL is proud to lead the way in healthcare education. It is an institution-wide enterprise involving a lot of staff and students in a range of practical activities, policy decisions and educational scholarship. Perhaps the best known element of the policy is the adjusted entrance criteria which enables us to use a formula in which we consider making an offer to a minimum of BBC, instead of AAB, to candidates who are applying to us from schools with a significantly reduced examination track record where the candidate’s achievement is 60 per cent better than the average for their school. It is only the grades in a final offer that are adjusted — these candidates still have to be successful at interview and take the subjects we require for admission to medicine. It is worth stressing that the policy on adjusted criteria for MBBS entry is only a small part of a far-reaching widening participation strategy throughout the institution and I’d encourage anyone who wants to find out more to contact us.    Q: What kind of candidate is eligible for this? A: An effective widening participation strategy has to be more sophisticated than simply relying on demographic variables as proxies for admission decisions. It is impossible to say candidates from a particular postcode, ethnicity or of a certain age automatically warrant differential treatment. Instead, it is about ensuring fair access for anyone who has the potential to study the biological, medical and healthcare sciences. Obviously, factors such as economic disadvantage, social background, family circumstances and educational experiences have a powerful bearing on whether someone can successfully access and flourish in higher education, but we are not in the business of ‘quotas’ even though we do target our activities — for example, working with particular schools, age groups and in specific locations. This is about social justice, not ‘social engineering’.   Q: But hang on a minute. Our courses are so popular, shouldn’t we be narrowing, not widening, participation? A: We are in a great position as an institution with a good reputation and a lot of popular courses to choose the students with the most potential and do it in the fairest way possible. Many of our courses lead to vocational qualifications for healthcare professions where public service for the whole community is the principal function. Healthcare courses, particularly medicine, have commonly been represented as ‘elite’, meaning some excellent candidates from non-traditional backgrounds wouldn’t even consider applying for our courses. The reasons are various and complex: poor self-esteem, lack of familiarity with healthcare education, no opportunity to do work experience, absence of role models, chaotic family lives and financial worries are all powerful disincentives to apply to university, still less for a career such as healthcare which can appear ‘closed’ to some who would make excellent future nurses, doctors, midwives, pharmacists and so on. This is about levelling the playing field so we know that we have done everything possible to select the best candidates from the many we are lucky to have apply each year, and perhaps remembering that our goal is to produce workers who will join a broad profession serving diverse populations in multiple ways.   Q: Won’t students with lower grades struggle? And won’t this burden our teaching staff? A: First, I would challenge the assumption that these students will struggle. There are myriad reasons why any student might find the course difficult and it is simplistic to assume the explanation is simply because they are a ‘widening participation’ student. Second, there are lots of examples of change in medical education where negative consequences were predicted, a very good local one being the admission of non-science students to our Graduate Entry Programme. Thirdly, SGUL staff are already experienced in being aware of the different needs of students, and there is no greater burden in supporting a group who have already proved their motivation by overcoming additional hurdles to enter SGUL. Indeed, we have a duty to ensure that we make sure they are supported in succeeding. Fortunately, there is expertise in learning support and student welfare on which staff can draw.   Q: Do any other HE establishments do this? A: More and more, some by choice, others more as a result of policy direction from government. The majority of higher education institutions will have someone whose work is branded as ‘widening participation’. It is nothing new, though — I recall very well three Oxford University undergraduates coming to my own comprehensive school as part of the ‘Target Schools’ initiative in 1984 and as a result I applied to, and eventually attended, Oxford. HEFCE funding and government priorities mean that all universities have to work proactively to ensure fair access. However, as a standalone healthcare and bioscience institution it is potentially more difficult for SGUL to work effectively in widening participation which makes the achievements of Kenton Lewis and his team all the more noteworthy. SGUL is also the only institution as far as I am aware to link the practical, raising aspirations aspects of widening participation, to educational development and scholarship. As I said, we lead the way!