WEEKEND READING: UUK Contextual Admissions Guidance: A Response

This blog was kindly authored by Tom Fryer, Charlie Deeks, Sylvie Lomer, Paul Smith and Steven Jones, all of HERE@Manchester, the Higher Education research group based at University of Manchester.

On 10^th July 2026, Universities UK (UUK) published Contextual Admission: A guide to fair and transparent practice, which provides guidance on the practice of contextual admissions in English universities, forming an appendix to UUK-GuildHE Fair Admissions Code of Practice. The document was developed in collaboration with UCAS and the Sutton Trust, and aims to guide contextual admissions practices to ensure that they are fair, transparent, and delivered to best support widening participation.

The publication  is a welcome intervention. Sector-level discussion on the principles and practice of contextual admissions is essential, both to clarify expectations around good practice, as well as to support the development of a more consistent approach that applicants and their advisors can navigate. We share UUK’s hope that this results in a fairer and more transparent process, which ultimately serves to widen participation in higher education.

We were particularly glad to see the firm commitment to the idea that contextual admissions should be designed, implemented, and evaluated as a ‘widening access initiative’ (p.6) rather than a recruitment tool. The guide is explicit that:

Contextual admissions exist as a widening participation intervention to take account of structural inequality, not to drive recruitment. Contextual offers must never be used to secure acceptances or influence applicant decision-making.

(p.4)

We agree that some contextual consideration of university applications is necessary, given the various social and educational inequalities that impact applicants’ attainment and prior experiences. Not to do this would mean that admissions processes mistake privilege for merit and ‘judg[e] [applicants] based on barriers beyond their control’ (p.3).

Within HERE@Manchester, this new guidance prompted several questions and reflections. We share two of these questions below, with the aim of contributing to a constructive debate on the future of contextual admissions in English higher education.

Does the sector currently practice contextual admissions for widening participation? If not, how far does practice deviate from this principle?

As mentioned, the guidance is clear that contextual admissions should be considered a ‘widening access initiative’ (p.6) rather than a recruitment tool. However, the guidance does not indicate the extent to which this reflects current practice, nor whether this requires a substantial shift in approach for many universities.

We (as a sector) don’t actually know how contextual admissions policies are developed and enacted. It is likely that admissions teams in different universities will work differently with widening participation professionals, and that the design, implementation and evaluation of such policies will involve a range of compromises between these stakeholders. There is therefore a need for in-depth research to explore these compromises, and the extent to which these local policies align with the principles in UUK’s guidance.

We also believe there is an opportunity to further clarify what appropriate and inappropriate practice would look like. There may well be a range of situations in which widening participation goals align with recruitment appropriately.

Our stance is that contextual admissions can be considered a widening participation intervention when designed and implemented to address the impact of structural barriers in university admissions. This chimes with UUK’s guidance, and the talk of universities drawing upon ‘the latest research and evidence’ (p.11), using ‘valid measures of structural disadvantage’ (p.11), and articulating these as a ‘theory of change to establish what their contextual interventions are intended to achieve’ (p.12). These should be described and evaluated along with other widening participation activities in Access and Participation Plans.

In contrast, it would be inappropriate to design and implement contextual admissions policies to increase the number of firm offer holders at a given university. If this is the primary driver of the policy, or if these recruitment concerns are used to decide the nature of the policy (say the size of the grade-reduction in contextual offers), then this shifts the policy into a recruitment tool, which we would consider inappropriate.

We believe it is questionable how many contextual admissions policies would be considered widening participation interventions under the definitions above. For this reason, we believe there is particular value in providing further guidance in this area.

What’s the route forward? How can we move to a system where contextual admissions does more to contribute to widening participation?

Although the guidance does not tackle this question head-on, there appears to be an implicit assumption that contextual admissions can be reformed to better contribute to widening participation goals through the action of individual universities. In other words, it is through the action of individual universities, say, in adopting evidence-based design and evaluation of their policies, that contextual admissions can shift to best support widening participation.

We see two potential issues with this approach.

First, evaluating the impact of contextual admissions on widening participation is far from a simple and technical task. Let’s explain this through an example.

A university evaluates its contextual admissions policy and finds that students who entered their institution with a two-grade reduction were slightly more likely to drop out in their first year, compared with their peers, and that they demonstrated slightly lower attainment during university.

There are multiple competing explanations of the gaps. This could be driven by:

• Students enter higher education with less potential to succeed than their peers.
• Students face the same structural barriers during their time in higher education.
• The university has limited support and pedagogical practice to support these students upon entering higher education.

A simple evaluation, especially one that draws on quantitative administrative data, is unlikely to be able to judge the relative merit of each explanation. Moreover, the evaluation would not be able to directly answer the question: how much of a gap in retention or success is acceptable? This isn’t a purely technical question, but one that depends on the weight we give to the values of diversity and inclusion. Evaluation in this area is necessarily complex, with gaps in retention and success not necessarily evidencing the need to reform and restrict contextual admissions policies. (We look forward to engaging with Prof Anna Zimdars and TASO who are working within this broad area.)

A second potential issue with this route to change relates to wider structural forces.

The English higher education system has placed providers into competition with one another for students. This competition has intensified over time, particularly with the shift to uncapped entry and the reduction in the unit of resource per student. In such a climate, universities are working in a system that incentivises them to prioritise strategies for student recruitment. These incentives serve to penalise institutions that do not utilise levers to drive recruitment; universities that do not use contextual admissions to prioritise recruitment goals lose out on funding compared with their competitors.

For this reason, we would question whether contextual admissions can contribute further to widening participation without additional forms of centralisation.

There are elements of centralisation contained within the guidance. For example, there is discussion of taking a more consistent approach, both in terms of a central repository for contextual admissions policies and the use of shared language (p.15). Similarly, the guidance takes a strong stance on the appropriateness of different metrics, with area-based indicators labelled ‘contextually useful but not to be used in isolation’ (p.9). This implies there may be opportunities for greater consistency, based on this centralised approach to assess indicator validity.

Our question is whether the best route to embed this consistency is through the action of individual universities. Specifically, does it make sense for individual universities to be responsible for evaluating the evidence of a structural barrier, especially when they are subject to the market pressures noted above, rather than this being accounted for in a more centralised way?

There are plenty of international examples of more centralised ways of approaching contextualisation. In Australia, the ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank) students can apply for adjustment at state-level to contextualise their result, based on personal characteristics, indigenous status or prior educational circumstances. Closer to home, Scottish universities have taken a centralised approach towards the language around contextual admissions, with each university providing ‘minimum entry requirements’, making the application process clearer for students.

In summary, our research group welcomes UUK’s recent publication Contextual Admission: A guide to fair and transparent practice as an important intervention. In this piece, we hope to contribute to the debate – both in reflecting on the size and nature of any changes in approach, as well as in thinking through the routes to enable contextual admissions to further contribute to widening participation.