Are contextual offers effective?

[TheBanffie]

I've read a fair bit about contextual offers, and whilst the aims are clear and laudable (widening participation, levelling the playing field for less advantaged people etc.) I can't find any publications on whether those aims are achieved, and if people who are accepted with lower school grades have the same degree outcomes as people not on contextual offers. I have no skin the game, my kids are in primary and I'm sure the system will look very different if/when they go to uni- just curious and cannot find any reports or research online. Is anyone here looking at this?

I was given a contextual offer 40+ years ago, and am now a lecturer with a PhD after a long and interesting career. But I am only one example, it would be interesting to see some research on this.

My university could be characterised as ‘upper Russell Group’ and my STEM School has a very demanding offer. Our contextual offer is slightly less onerous on paper and also leaves room for individual circumstances.

We did an outcomes study recently. There was no difference in outcomes between students with contextual offers and other students.

Good to know the groups get the same degree outcomes. I've (anecdotally) heard that the Scottish system of deciding who lives in a disadvantaged area is too crude (especially for rural areas covering big areas in the same SMID/ postcode) and from friends in higher ed that some students with lower grades in highly technical areas struggle at uni despite extra support. This is the sort of data I'm interested in - out of curiosity & concern about trends in Scottish schooling quality, not a particular personal viewpoint on contextual offers.

Used to work at Edinburgh and the WP team there were very confident that once at uni, the students did as well as non-contextual offer-holders. I didn’t dig into the outcomes data, but they were a professional bunch and I would trust them.
obviously Scottish non-contextual students have mostly also been through Scottish schooling, so not sure I understand your broader question, but may be misunderstanding.

Hmm, I am not sure about this.For subjects like Maths, where you are building on A level learning, how are lower achievers going to cope?

Presumably the logic is that they are only lower achievers because they had more on their plates and that in terms of intellectual potential, resilience, independent learning etc they are more likely to cope. But it does tend to suggest that the disadvantages thar affected their relative outcomes at school are less at play at university and who knows really if that's the case. It also begs the question what qualifications are for at all really.

I went to a Russell group and got a contextual offer because, to paraphrase, not a lot of people in my postcode apply to university each year. I live in what is, essentially, a huge retirement village. Everyone bar us is retired. So of course they don't apply to uni! It was my dream uni and dream course so I didn't say anything but it did make me laugh

A great question. It happens that Maths background is vital for my subject with the overwhelming majority in my School having A stars in Maths and A or A star in FM. Students on a contextual offer are somewhat less likely to have FM. A very few have only grade Ain Maths.

Retention of A level knowledge, ability to use retained knowledge, and ability to learn and use new knowledge at university are key issues. We are not one of the COWI Schools but the next tier. Turns out that much of the Maths knowledge our students bring from high school is very loosely held and tightly situated: they have already forgotten a portion of it by the time term begins and they have a difficult tome using it in new contexts. Y1 students are also notorious for tome management problems. For the retention problem I’m talking about a large minority; for the other problems I’m talking majorities, but by no means all students.

The best guess, because we have brainstormed but, given all our contraints haven’t felt the need to delve deeply into the outcomes discussed in my first post, is that students with contextual offers are (a) better used to managing their time in demanding situations and (b) better used to making sense of the world for themselves. Although (b) sounds quite generic it can help a lot with both new challenges and the academic issue of using math in new contexts.

I moved to America before coming to the UK. Hence I occasionally slip up and say ‘msth’ rather than ‘maths’

I can make good logical arguments gor both words!

This is one of issues I was wondering about - do contextual offers help social mobility or not? The issues I've heard about are that in Scotland they use postcode which is pretty crude - Holyrood Palace is in a deprived postcode for example, and rural postcodes cover massive areas. I'd hope there was proper research being done on detailed characteristics of who gets them and if it helps longterm outcomes in terms of degree achievement and post-uni employment. It sounds like a good idea but is there evidence that it works?

@TheBanffie the was postcode based for me too.

I guess in some areas it will really work because there are areas of deprivation, but for me it was just funny

The point is that they are only lower achievers due to their contextual circumstances and that if they had a different start in life including different schooling and socioeconomic group their grades would have been higher, perhaps even exceeding the standard offer

Academics at Cambridge have also studied degree attainment more formally. I am rather rushed now, but results were reported in the press a few years ago and were positive. IIRC, those on contextual offers attain a degree classification roughly half a class higher than their incoming grades would predict, overall, and this makes their outcomes about average.

My School did our own study, discussed above, because of our particular circumstances

I am not aware of any employment outcome studies, but in any case the multifactorial decision making processes behind employment outcomes would make it impossible to isolate the benefits or otherwise of contextual offers. For ‘multifactorial decision making processes’ you may quite correctly substitute ‘preference for middle class accents and manners’ on the part of certain employers