Widening access policy has historically focused on tackling the socioeconomic barriers to university access faced by prospective students from under-represented groups, but increasingly policy makers are seeking to also address the barriers to wider access posed by undergraduate admissions policies. In this vein, the Scottish Government has recently called upon universities to set separate academic entry requirements for socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants which recognise that "the school attainment of disadvantaged learners often does not reflect their full potential" and which better reflect the minimum needed to succeed in higher education. In this paper, we draw on in-depth interviews with admissions personnel at eighteen Scottish universities to explore the scope for more progressive admissions policies of this kind in light of universities' identities as organisations and in light of corresponding organisational strategies for position-taking in global and national higher education fields. We present a theoretical model and an empirical illustration of three hierarchically-ordered ideal types of organisational identity-globally competitive, nationally selective, and locally transformative-and show that the more dominant of these tend to constrain the development of more progressive admissions policies. This is because globally competitive and, to a lesser extent, nationally selective organisational identities are understood to require admission of the 'brightest and best', conceptualised as those with the highest levels of prior academic attainment who can be expected to succeed at university and beyond as a matter of course. We conclude that universities must recognise and redress the implicitly exclusionary nature of their organisational identities if genuine progress on widening access is to be made.

The higher education regulator for England has set challenging new widening access targets requiring universities to rethink how merit is judged in admissions. Universities are being encouraged to move away from the traditional meritocratic equality of opportunity model of fair access, which holds that university places should go to the most highly qualified candidates irrespective of social background, in accordance with the principles of procedural fairness. Instead, they are being asked to move towards what we term the meritocratic equity of opportunity model, which holds that prospective students’ qualifications should be judged in light of the socioeconomic circumstances in which these were obtained to enhance distributive fairness, a practice known in the UK as contextualised admissions. In this paper, we critically discuss the theoretical underpinnings of these two competing perspectives on fair access and review the existing empirical evidence base, drawing together for the first time insights from our ESRC and Nuffield Foundation funded studies of fair access to highly academically selective universities in England. We argue that reconceptualising fair access in terms of distributive fairness rather than procedural fairness offers a more socially just set of principles on which to allocate valuable but scarce places at the most academically selective universities in England, unless or until such time as the vertical stratification of higher education institutions is reduced or eliminated entirely.

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The Scottish Government has set ambitious targets for widening access to full-time undergraduate degree programmes. Meeting these targets will be a real challenge, not least because young people from socioeconomically disadvantaged contexts continue to lag substantially behind their more advantaged peers when it comes to achievement at Higher level. Following the recommendations of the Commission on Widening Access, the Scottish Government has mandated Scottish universities to set separate entry requirements for contextually disadvantaged applicants, known as ‘access thresholds’. In this article, we draw on the findings of a research project commissioned by the Scottish Funding Council to develop an empirical evidence base for the use of access thresholds to widen participation in higher education. We show that access thresholds are mathematically necessary if wider access is to be achieved, and we present evidence demonstrating that applicants admitted with Higher grades lower than the market rate have a high probability of success at degree level. We welcome the widespread use of access thresholds but highlight the scope to be much bolder than is currently the case. We also show that the use of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) to identify contextually disadvantaged learners runs a high risk of failure to reach the intended beneficiaries. We argue strongly in favour of the use of administratively verified individual level measures of contextual disadvantage instead, specifically receipt of free school meals and low household income.

This paper explores how highly selective universities in England have responded to the Office for Students' call to make faster progress on widening access by 'rethinking how merit is judged in admissions' (OfS 2019: 8). Our analysis of the Access and Participation Plans (APPs) for 2020/21 to 2024/25 submitted to the Office for Students shows that England's most academically selective universities have committed to much more ambitious widening access targets than ever before. We also find that these universities have begun to articulate more structural explanations of socioeconomic inequalities in prior attainment; are making greater use of contextualised approaches to admissions; and are beginning to acknowledge the role they must play in supporting disadvantaged students to succeed at university. We argue that this represents the fragile beginnings of an important shift away from the traditional meritocratic model of admissions, in which university places go to the most highly qualified applicants irrespective of socioeconomic background, towards a more progressive model of admissions that seeks a greater degree of distributive fairness.