Our Policy Position

Our members offer a broad range of courses, many of which are professionally rooted and taught by industry professionals, and all of our institutions are proud to support their local region. Our Widening Participation work (link to WP page) ensures that students from all backgrounds are able to participate in our courses and have access to the appropriate prerequisite skills and training where necessary.

Several GuildHE members are members of the UCAS Board and GuildHE is also represented on the UCAS Council. Whilst we have a good working relationship with UCAS, we have been actively lobbying for the revision of their offer rate calculator, which disproportionately disadvantages small and specialist providers. We are especially concerned that the UCAS course coding used means our member’s courses are not fairly advertised, and in many cases due to small numbers of students not included in search results. The calculator only uses A Level results, which are of less importance to our members when providing a fair admissions service, and it does not take account of institutions that audition, interview and ask for portfolios as part of the recruitment process. This skews the offer rate results as many students don’t show up for interview and are therefore logged as not receiving an offer. Whilst we appreciate the sentiment of being more transparent about what grades are usually accepted across all HE providers, it over simplifies the recruitment process for students and provides misleading data.

Our admissions and recruitment network brings together staff from across our membership to share ideas, problem solve and create policy narratives for our work. Recently we have been working on the impact GDPR has on the recruitment process, better supporting the recruitment of those with criminal convictions and estranged students. The decline in the number of young people access and obtaining GCSE and A Level qualifications in arts and technology subjects has also been a keen area of interest. More information about this work can be found here (link to Arts Education page).