WEEKEND READING: Why Access and Participation Plans aren’t working for music conservatoires and what could

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Scott Caizley, Head of Widening Participation at the Royal Academy of Music.

A regulator in transition

2026 has been a busy year for the Office for Students. Susan Lapworth left the chief executive’s role at Easter. Josh Fleming, the OfS’s Director of Strategy and Delivery, has stepped in as interim CEO until Ruth Hannant and Polly Payne arrive in mid-June as the regulator’s first joint chief executives. Professor Chris Millward – the OfS’s first Director for Fair Access and Participation – returned in November 2025 in an interim capacity, following John Blake’s departure at the end of his four-year term. A permanent successor has not yet been named.

This is, in other words, a moment of unusual openness in English Higher Education regulation. New leadership, a post-16 White Paper that has placed widening access at the centre of the political conversation, and an explicit signal from government that the regulation of Access and Participation Plans (APPs) is to be reformed toward a more risk-based system. It is also a moment in which a sector that has, until now, been quietly difficult to fit inside the APP regime deserves a closer look.

I want to make a case for that sector here. UK music conservatoires are small, specialist, and disproportionately consequential. They produce the majority of the country’s professional classical musicians. They are also among the most class-stratified institutions in higher education. Sutton Trust analysis published in 2024 found that 43% of leading classical musicians attended an independent school against a national baseline of 7%, and that the proportion of privately educated students at the largest conservatoires reaches 60% – higher than at Oxbridge. This might come as no surprise to regular readers at HEPI, as I wrote on this back in 2019.

This piece draws on a comparative analysis I have undertaken of widening participation policy across all nine major UK music conservatoires. The fuller argument is being developed for academic publication; the case I want to make here is more public-facing, and more concrete: the APP regime, as currently calibrated, is not delivering for this sub-sector and that some specific reforms could begin to change that.

The problem in plain terms

The APP framework was designed, sensibly, for the higher education sector as it predominantly exists: large generalist providers with cohort sizes that allow for statistical inference, standardised attainment data that flow through schools, and pre-entry conditions that are at least partially legible in POLAR4, IMD or free-school-meals indicators. The OfS Standards of Evidence framework, distinguishing narrative (Type 1), empirical (Type 2) and causal (Type 3) evidence, is calibrated to that scale. So is the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register introduced in the 2023 reforms.

Music conservatoires are a different kind of provider. UK home undergraduate intakes are small by any standard, often numbering only in the dozens, and a fraction of those at the large universities the APP regime was principally designed to regulate. Admissions are determined not by UCAS tariff but by audition, in which the applicant’s standard of instrumental performance is assessed against a high specialist benchmark. The capital that drives audition success (often years of one-to-one instrumental tuition, weekend junior conservatoire training, exposure to professional musical environments, parental investment of time and money) is acquired largely outside the school system, and is therefore largely invisible in the data infrastructures the OfS uses to identify risk.

This is the structural problem. APPs at music conservatoires are written into a regulatory frame whose evidential expectations they cannot easily meet, against risks that the regulator’s own register cannot easily see, for cohorts whose size makes conventional pre/post empirical evaluation statistically fragile. A handful of state-school students, five, six, ten, entering one cohort can move a conservatoire’s headline percentage figures by ten or more percentage points. The TASO guidance on impact evaluation with small cohorts is a methodological workaround. It is not a solution to the regulatory mismatch.

The consequence of the recent corpus of conservatoire APPs, is plans that are well-formulated, ambitious in their commitments to pre- and post-evaluation, and genuinely motivated by a desire to widen access. Where gaps remain in demonstrating empirical and causal evidence, these reflect the wider methodological challenges facing the sector rather than any lack of institutional commitment. It is worth acknowledging, as scholars such as Sara Ahmed’s institutional ethnography have explored, that questions about the relationship between inclusion commitments and measurable outcomes are not unique to conservatoires – they are live debates across higher education more broadly. Conservatoires are, however, unusually exposed to one particular structural constraint: the conditions that shape inequality at the conservatoire gate. Principally, the accumulation of pre-entry musical capital,  developed a long time before a student reaches any widening participation intervention, which lies largely beyond what any single institution can address alone.

What contextual admissions cannot do

A common reflex when widening participation is discussed in elite higher education is to reach for contextual admissions, which means adjusting offer thresholds for applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. This works, with appropriate caveats, at universities where the offer is expressed in A-Level grades or equivalent. It is the basis of Cambridge’s and Oxford’s contextual flagging, of the work of organisations like UpReach and the Sutton Trust, and of much of the contextual-admissions literature.

However, it does not work at conservatoires, at least not in the same form, because the operative threshold is not a grade. It is a level of instrumental performance reached through years of cumulative training. You cannot lower a conservatoire audition standard by half a grade and expect the student to cope with the demands of the programme once admitted. The training that produces conservatoire-readiness has typically begun by age eight or nine, sustained through weekly one-to-one tuition that, at current market rates, costs a family thousands of pounds a year, and supplemented by the ecological privileges of musical childhoods that are not available at any price to a child whose parents do not possess them. This is the substantive content of what Anna Bull, in Class, Control, and Classical Music, calls the bodily disciplines of classical training, and what my own research has consistently found in interviews with state-school musicians: that conservatoire-readiness is not a matter of innate talent but of cumulative, costly, early-acquired advantage. It is also what my work with Roberta Comunian, Tamsyn Dent, Dave O’Brien, Tessa Read and Natalie Wreyford found in our report for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Creative Diversity on ‘What Works’ to support diversity and inclusion in creative education and the talent pipeline.

The implication is not that contextual approaches are useless at conservatoires. It is that they have to look different. They have to take the form of long-cycle pre-entry investment that begins years before the audition: sustained instrumental tuition, mentoring, performance opportunity, and exposure to the cultural environments in which classical music lives. They have to look like the foundation-year and partnership-orchestra models that several conservatoires have begun to develop, and like the patient, multi-year pre-entry work that the more and more APPs in the sector now describe. None of this is captured by a contextual admissions adjustment alone, and none of it can happen without sustained funding that the regulatory frame, in its current form, does not adequately recognise

What the regulator could do: five practical reforms

The reforms below are pitched at a level the OfS, the Scottish Funding Council and Medr (the new Welsh tertiary regulator established in 2024) could act on without primary legislation.

First, a small-and-specialist provider track within the APP regime. The OfS already operates a category-based regulatory architecture, and TASO has developed small-cohort guidance. What does not yet exist is an integrated APP submission pathway calibrated for providers whose UK undergraduate intake numbers are in the dozens. Such a track would adjust evidential expectations to the realistic statistical conditions, allow for pooled cross-institutional comparator data (see below), and recognise that for sub-sectors of this size, longitudinal narrative-and-empirical evaluation is methodologically more credible than under-powered pseudo-experimental work. This is not a relaxation of standards. It is a calibration of the standards to the data conditions in which they are being asked to operate.

Second, a sector-wide longitudinal tracking arrangement for the conservatoire sub-sector. The single biggest constraint on Type 2 evaluation at conservatoires is cohort size. The single most powerful response (proposed in my forthcoming research and entirely actionable) is for bodies like Conservatoires UK to coordinate, with regulator support, a shared longitudinal tracking infrastructure across the nine major institutions. Pooled data on access, audition success, on-course experience and progression, gathered consistently across the sub-sector, would yield comparator cohorts of meaningful statistical size and permit the kind of cross-institutional learning that single-institution APPs structurally cannot. The technical architecture is not novel: HEAT does versions of this for outreach, and the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Studies network has piloted sub-sectoral data work. What is needed is the regulatory and institutional commitment to do it at scale.

Third, recognition of pre-entry musical capital in the OfS Equality of Opportunity Risk Register. The current EORR captures twelve risks ranging from prior knowledge and skills through to mental health, cost pressures and progression from higher education. None addresses, with the specificity the conservatoire sector requires, the cumulative instrumental and cultural capital that determines audition outcomes. A sector-specific risk indicator, formally recognised, with associated reporting expectations, would give conservatoires the regulatory language for a structural feature of their field that is, at present, only narratively describable. This is the kind of refinement the post-16 White Paper’s shift toward risk-based regulation could readily accommodate.

Fourth, ringfenced WP investment in the schools-based pre-entry pipeline, recognised as APP-counting expenditure. Conservatoires already invest substantially in junior conservatoire programmes, school partnerships and pre-entry pathway work. Where this work is delivered through the conservatoire but reaches school-aged children outside HE, it has historically sat uncomfortably within APP expenditure categories oriented toward outreach to current applicants. A clearer regulatory acknowledgement that long-cycle pre-entry investment in schools is the principal mechanism by which conservatoires can shift the upstream conditions (and therefore counts, with appropriate evidential expectations, as APP-relevant activity) would align the regulatory framework with the empirical reality of what works.

Finally, formal cross-jurisdictional alignment. The conservatoire sub-sector is regulatorily fragmented. Seven of the nine major UK conservatoires fall within the OfS regime; the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland operates under Scottish Funding Council Outcome Agreements; the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama operates under Medr Fee and Access Plan arrangements. The substantive WP work is comparable across the four nations. The reporting infrastructures are not. A modest cross-regulator alignment, a shared evidence vocabulary, a common set of headline indicators for the sub-sector, mutual recognition of evaluation standards, would enable joint sectoral learning that the present fragmentation prevents.

Why this matters now

The conservatoire sub-sector is small enough that the regulator could fix this with a focused intervention. It is consequential enough, in shaping the social composition of the UK’s classical music profession, that the consequences of inaction are disproportionate. And it is in transition, alongside the regulator itself, into a new policy moment.

NEON’s recent survey of widening access teams showed that 58% of providers reported reduced WP financial resources in the 2025/26 financial year, and 58% reported reduced staffing. The story at conservatoires is not different. The institutions that produce a vastly disproportionate share of the country’s professional musicians and performers are being asked to widen access against a regulatory frame that does not see them clearly, with evaluation expectations they cannot easily meet, and budgets that are, sector-wide, contracting.

The arrival of Hannant and Payne in June, and the appointment of a permanent Director for Fair Access and Participation in due course, presents an opportunity. The post-16 White Paper has explicitly invited reform of the APP regime. The reforms outlined here are modest, technically achievable, and would, in my view, materially improve the regulatory conditions for a sub-sector that has been carrying the weight of a regulatory mismatch for too long.

Widening participation in conservatoires is not Oxbridge widening participation. It is not Russell Group widening participation. It is its own thing: small, structural, and deeply tied to the upstream conditions of musical childhood. The plans through which the sector addresses it deserve a regulatory frame calibrated to the work, not the work calibrated to a regulatory frame designed for a different kind of institution. That recalibration, if the new OfS leadership chooses to undertake it, would be a quiet but genuinely consequential act of fair access reform.