Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, has published an article in The Guardian suggesting that both fair access and widening participation are ‘achieved by providing more places’ at universities. He highlights the differences between the two by comparing both fair access and widening participation to a funnel, in which the ‘fair access debate is about pushing a chosen few through a hole in a very tight funnel’ and widening participation is ‘about making the hole as big as possible’.
Meanwhile, in another article in the Times Higher Education, Hillman claims that there is ‘always a time lag in the data’ published of key UK government-commissioned research. He continues, ‘We are not talking about nice-to-have research; we are talking about some of the most important areas of government policy – on student poverty, on the strength of our research base and on widening participation.’
Mr Hillman suggests Whitehall’s constant restructuring and reorganisng from 2010, with the introduction of the austerity programme under Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osbourne and then from the ‘huge upheaval’ caused by the Brexit vote, as the source of the situation.
Times Higher Education contacted the DfE and BEIS on the matter, who responded that ‘the reports in question would be published “in due course”‘.
Evidence is a vital part of policymaking, and was brought back into politics by Government’s White Paper Modernising Government in 1999. It was recognised that while ‘all policies are based on evidence – the question is more whether the evidence itself, and the processes through which this evidence is put to turn it into policy options, are of sufficiently high quality.‘ While it is, of course, essential to maintain our culture of evidence-based research for strategies and policies, it is essential to ensure reports are both published and made accessible.