More, Different and Better

In the fourth and final guest blog on the decline in part-time student recruitment, Tessa Stone argues that the potential of part-time study as a driver of widening participation and social mobility depends on access to good information, advice and guidance.

Part-time higher education has the potential to be a serious driver of widening participation and social mobility, particularly in the context of rising tuition fees. It provides a way into HE for groups such as young entrants who want to combine earning and learning, employees who want to retrain while maintaining the security of their current job, those who ‘missed out’ at 18 and are looking for a risk-reduced second chance, and a whole host of others for whom the flexibility of part-time suits their circumstances.

However, that potential will not be realised if these prospective students are either unaware that it’s a realistic option, or don’t fully understand how to access it. With more, and more complex, education and employment pathways available now, advice and guidance has never been more necessary in helping people make informed choices about the different routes to a degree.

There is no national, centralised resource for finding out about part-time HE, let alone seeking tailored advice on it. The National Careers Service site – insufficiently well-known among the target audience as it is – focuses largely on access to the job market and has very little information about part-time study; certainly nothing of use if you’re coming at it from a standing start. UCAS only includes information on part-time courses between July and September, and then only for those universities who wish to include the information, and applications have to be made direct to the institution. Simply reaching the endlessly diverse potential audience for part-time HE currently relies almost totally on serendipity, and even if you’ve thought about what you want to do, having to trawl endlessly through individual university websites is not an ideal scenario.

Government cannot introduce higher education policy change on the scale it has in the last three years and not fund a serious information campaign backed up by access to personalised guidance – not if they want that policy change to bear fruit. Even though tuition fee loans are now available to part-time students, we cannot expect people to take the sort of leap of faith that often accompanies part-time study without being armed with the facts, and having had the opportunity properly to understand, assess and weigh up the risks and the benefits.

Ideally, of course, we should not be talking about audiences segmented in this way. Careers IAG, like learning, should be a lifelong process, with people supported in making the most appropriate choices from all the available options, whatever their age. However, I’d be happy for now with good-quality information and guidance on part-time HE being made available through the National Careers Service or any other existing national mechanism, and a national awareness-raising campaign so that people from all walks of life know that the option is available, and within their grasp.

Tessa Stone is Chief Executive of Brightside, an education charity which creates, develops and manages online mentoring projects, and Chair of the Bridge Group, an independent policy association promoting social mobility through higher education.

All four blogs in this series have been adapted from articles to appear in a special issue of Adults Learning examining the reasons behind the decline in part-time and mature student recruitment and asking what might be done to reverse it. The special issue will be published next week.