Widening participation policies must play a large role in every university's preparations for 2012. We have a very good record on this - one of the very best within the Russell Group.   But in some of the discussions I've been party to in the last few weeks I've got the feeling that some attitudes are based on prejudice rather than real evidence.  Several times I have heard it assumed that the Faculty of Arts and Humanities has relatively fewer students from widening participation backgrounds than other Faculties, that Engineering has particular appeal for those from familes or areas with little experience of higher education, that Medicine (despite our efforts) is still a very middle class discipline to get into.

I recently asked the Admissions team to provide some data on this at departmental level, and they have today provided 5 year entry profiles on issues such as gender, disability, mature students, ethnicity, and widening participation backgrounds.  I would have also liked data on the independent v. state school divide, but those are much harder to extract from the system.  I want to comment here on two particular data sets that I have found interesting.

In some ways the ethnicity data (home students only) are not surprising. We can see at graduation something of the diverse ethnicity of students, although we can't at that point identify who is actually an overseas student and who is from a Black or Ethnic Minority (normally known as BME) group from the UK.  On average over the 5 years of my data, 12.2% of UK students on entry declared themselves to be non-white.  That is higher than for the city of Sheffield as a whole (the last census - admittedly now outdated - recorded 8.8% of Sheffield's population as non-white).  Four of our five faculties had departments that straddled that average.  Only in Arts and Humanities did all departments have student entries that produced below-average proportions. The lowest proportion of non-white UK students on entry was actually in a Social Sciences discipline.  The highest was in a subject area in the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health where almost half of all entering students over a five year period were of non-white ethnicity.

But the data on widening participation are more surprising (at least to me).  On the measure used (relating to neighbourhood of origin) 11.8% of entering students were classed as from areas with very low participation in higher education.  The departmental range within the university was from 7.7% to 19.7% on five year data.  This time every faculty had departments both above and below the institutional average.  Some of those stereotypes I have heard in recent weeks are immediately confounded.  Certainly most Engineering departments exceeded the university average, but the largest such department was below.  As many Arts and Humanities departments exceeded the university average as undershot it - and it was an Arts and Humanities department that came fourth in the overall university league table.  Medicine itself actually brought in more widening participation students than the university average - so much for the stereotypes of it as a very middle class area.  It was a department within the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health that produced the highest score over five years, whilst one in Social Sciences produced the lowest - and that was actually my greatest surprise.  So much for stereotypes: they need challenging, and the data have challenged mine!

That's it for this week. I'm taking tomorrow as a day's leave.  I'll be back next month.