Speeches

Ben Howlett – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Ben Howlett on 2016-02-05.

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what estimate he has made of the proportion of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who applied to university in each of the last six years.

Joseph Johnson

The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) publishes data on application and entry rates for full-time undergraduate courses.

The tables show the proportion of 18 year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds who applied to university by the main January deadline (application rate) and the proportion of 18 year olds that accepted a place during a UCAS application cycle (entry rate).

Table 1: Application rates for English 18 year olds from POLAR3 quintile 1 areas (for entry in year)

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

15.2%

18.0%

18.6%

17.9%

18.9%

20.4%

21.0%

22.0%

Table 2: Entry rates for English 18 year olds from POLAR3 quintile 1 areas (for entry in year)

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

13.6%

14.2%

15.1%

15.1%

16.4%

17.8%

18.5%

Notes:

  1. Data published by UCAS covers full-time undergraduate applications. Table 1 shows the application rates by the main January deadline.
  2. Data for entry rates in Table 2 include acceptances across the whole application cycle.
  3. Disadvantage is measured by POLAR quintile 1 an area based measure of low participation.
  4. Source of data for application rates: UCAS ‘Application rates by the January Deadline’ report for the 2016 cycle (underlying data for Figure 14) – published in February 2016.
  5. Source of data for entry rates: UCAS ‘2015 End of Cycle’ report (underlying data for Figure 65) – published in December 2015.