The University of London is to announce a fully fledged undergraduate degree course completely taught online for £5,650 per year over three years.It is aimed at encouraging more part-time, working students, following a fall in their numbers after the increase in tuition fees in England. There are plans for 3,000 students to take the computer science course. It comes as the prime minister's review of tuition fees aims to encourage more flexible and cheaper ways to study. The review follows co...

One academic's innovative idea for helping a deprived community? Ask parents what they need to raise their own aspirations – and then work with them to deliver it Trisha Bennett has lived in Whitley for nearly four decades, so she knows it better than most. She has had a front-row seat for all the outside attempts to ‘save’ the people that live there. And there have been many, many attempts: the community development consultant says that the area has been “initiatived to death”....

Disadvantaged students are more than three times as likely to live at home while attending university than their wealthier peers, a new study has found. Moving long distances to study for a degree is largely the preserve of “white, middle class, privately educated young people,” the report from social mobility Sutton Trust suggests. The study found that more than half (55.8 per cent) of young people n 2014/15 stayed local for university, attending institutions that were less than around 55 mil...

Experts have called for a national debate about "culture and ambition in white working class families" after it emerged that the number of young white people going to university has declined over the past three years, despite an overall increase in admissions. New figures published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA)​ show the number of white students has fallen by more than 34,000 since 2013/14 – a decrease of 2 per cent – while in total enrolments rose by 1 per cent in the same...

Children from deprived backgrounds face the worst prospects in some of the richest parts of the country, according to a damning new study that lays bare deep geographical divisions across Britain. An annual report by the government’s own social mobility watchdog warns that while London and its suburbs are pulling away, rural, coastal and former industrial areas are being left behind. Alan Milburn, chair of the Social Mobility Commission, highlighted how the Brexit vote made the geographical di...

Universities have been actively trying to increase the diversity of their student body for some time. At one end of the scale lies Oxford, where it was recently revealed that one in three colleges failed to admit a single black student in 2015. At the other end are many institutions in London, which collectively educate the majority of BAME students. Enrolled in the city’s universities are twice as many pupils who were eligible for free school meals as the next best-performing region, the highes...

When Fatima Afzal was offered a chemical engineering job in the US, she worried what it would be like to transfer to a country where people might never have seen a British Muslim before. She moved, and found her suspicions confirmed in an environment dominated by “very big alpha males”. It was challenging, but she coped. She credits her confidence to a placement year spent abroad, in Malaysia, during her undergraduate degree at Aston University: “If I hadn’t taken that first step I would be clos...

David Lammy’s revelation about Oxbridge’s “apartheid” raises many pertinent issues, but yet fundamentally misses the point. As a current third-year student at Keble College of ethnic minority and state school background, I would argue that while the statistics presented are shocking, Oxford is not solely to blame.  Seven years have changed nothing at Oxbridge. In fact, diversity is even worse David Lammy Read more Statistics are the basis of Lammy’s argument but he of...