Higher Education Policy Institute / January 2022
The Higher Education Policy Institute’s latest report, First-in-Family Students by Harriet Coombs (HEPI Report 146), finds most university students in the UK – just over two-thirds – can be classified ‘first-in-family’. It questions how useful the category is as an indicator for widening participation activities.
The paper argues too much weight has been put on first-in-family status as a measure of disadvantage for admissions to higher education because the indicator has many different definitions, is self-declared and unverifiable. There is also a lack of transparency over how it is applied.
The new report therefore recommends that only a tightly drawn first-in-family indicator should be used and, even then, only for lower stakes widening participation activities. For higher stakes activities, such as contextual offers at highly selective universities, it should be used only as part of a basket of measures.
