Final report of the Access Data Short-Life Working Group

Executive summary

Background

Widening access to higher education is a priority for the Scottish Government and higher education sector. In order to deliver on this priority, the Commission on Widening Access (CoWA) was set up and recommended a number of targets to achieve this goal. The key measure used for reporting progress against national targets is the area-based Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD). SIMD can be used to understand deprivation in a specific location based on an individual’s postcode, but cannot capture individual circumstances (e.g. household income). This means that there may be individuals experiencing deprivation living in non-deprived SIMD areas who are not captured by this data, or vice-versa. There have been various calls for action to make improvements on how to measure and target widening access support. As such, the Access Data Short-life Working Group (SLWG) was formed to consider possible data sources to complement SIMD. This report is the output of that group.

Purpose of the group and approach

In light of a) the various calls for exploring further, individual-level measures of deprivation, and b) the work previously undertaken by the Access Data Working Group (ADWG), the SLWG was created to progress the recommendations of CoWA, the ADWG, and the previous Commissioner for Fair Access.

The SLWG set out to consider whether specific individual-level data sources could be used alongside SIMD as part of a “basket” of widening access measures. The two measures investigated were Free School Meals (FSM) and Scottish Child Payment (SCP).

Recommendations

The SLWG recommends:

• FSM and SCP continue to be considered as widening access measures;
• Exploration of possible legislative approaches to FSM data sharing;
• Scoping work for the implementation of the proposed data sharing; and
• Continued emphasis on meeting the 2026 and 2030 SIMD20 targets.

Next steps

It is proposed that SG continues to investigate the legal routes to enable the sharing of FSM data in the first instance; and that the SLWG considers further analysis of the interaction between FSM, SCP and SIMD data (as this becomes available).

Further work will be undertaken to consider how widening access measures can support adult learners.