Sutton Trust - Advancing Social Mobility: A best practice guide for universities.
The Sutton Trust has published a new best practice guide to social mobility for universities, Advancing Social Mobility: A best practice guide for universities. The guide brings together evidence, practical recommendations, and examples from across the sector. It covers widening participation and outreach, admissions, transition, student success, careers, and postgraduate study.
Its recommendations include:
- Start with the problem, not the activity. Define the barrier, who experiences it and the intended outcome before choosing an intervention then evaluate its delivery and outcomes.
- Build sustained outreach pathways that are targeted fairly. Start early where appropriate, use individual, school, and area-level evidence, remove barriers to participation, and continue support through subject choice, application, and transition.
- Make admissions ambitious, transparent, and navigable. Use contextual admissions where the evidence supports them and explain clearly how selection methods and contextual information affect decisions.
- Build student success into the core university experience. Examine how teaching, assessment, timetabling, course costs, financial support and access to careers and wider opportunities affect different groups of students.
The guide’s central argument is that social mobility cannot sit with widening participation teams alone. Decisions made across university leadership, academic departments and professional services all shape who enters higher education, who succeeds and who progresses. Its call for a whole-provider approach is therefore about shared ownership and accountability.