Expansion in number of minority students will continue

Mohammad Surve assured that the Higher Education Funding Council’s decision not to allocate any more student places next year would not affect the University’s efforts to implement the HEFC’s Widening Participation programme.

The education officer of the Warwick Students’ Union said that while more undergraduate applicants may face rejection next year, the freeze will not affect the university’s initiatives to expand its intake of students from non-traditional backgrounds, including ethnic minorities.

Warwick runs three such programmes: the Aimhigher Summer School for all such students, Goal, which targets talented 10 to 13-year-olds, and the International Gateway for Gifted Youth (IGGY), which draws people aged 11 to 19 years from around the world.

Last month, it began a pilot programme called Aimhigher Associates, which trains university students to teach and mentor young people in local schools.

The HEFC’s decision would not affect the funding of these measures, he said.

“If you provide the right support to [these] students, nothing is going to stop them,” he insisted.

Earlier this month, the Higher Education Funding Council announced it would fund no more student places for 2009-10 after John Denham, the universities secretary, asked its chair, Tim Melville-Ross, to restrict the increase to the 10,000 it had already pledged.

Les Ebdon, chair of the university think-tank Million+, said the move might harm the government’s goal of widening participation to students of “non-traditional” background.

Since students from “non-traditional” schools apply later than those from fee-paying schools, he said, they might suffer disproportionately from the “intervention”.

In a letter to Melville-Ross last month, Mr. Denham said the government was “determined not to … [allow] student numbers to grow unsustainably and without proper financial support”.

He also suggested that the HEFCE take “contingency measures” to stop any “unplanned growth in student numbers”.

In taking these measures, Mr. Denham told Parliament he hoped to save GBP100m next year, at a time when the government is facing its highest level of borrowing in 14 years.

Two weeks ago, David Eastwood, chief executive of HEFCE, wrote to university vice-chancellors that the body would consider such steps “a matter of priority”. Among them, he said, would be constraining student intake by changing funding methods.