Bradford is an interesting case because they essentially took a very noble gamble that didn't pay off.
I'm not sure how long ago it was now, maybe 20 years ago or longer, they decided to make it their explicit mission to basically make up for the 'failures' of the school system.
What they wanted to do was to find and educate young people who were (or who had the capacity to be) academically clever but who had been let down by poor teaching and poor advice at school. These young people would come to Bradford from around the country and be taught in a way that was academically rigorous and challenging, helping them to rise up and access the kind of opportunities their innate cleverness entitled them to.
They positioned themselves as being different to the elitist universities who were uninterested in potential or the difficulties a student might have faced, and also different to the former-polys that were for practically-inclined and local students of no particular academic potential.
Alongside this, Bradford was to imbue its students with a sense of social and civic responsibility. Essentially these students were to be seeds or catalysts for educational development in more deprived communities. They would not only be examples, but would actively engage to bring about improvement in their home communities.
In reality this proved to be rather doomed for different reasons. Bradford was already kind of on the slide at that point anyway, so in a lot of respects this was something of a hit-and-hope strategy from the outset.
There were also a lot of disagreements within the university about this mission and whether it would stop Bradford's decline that limited how well they were able to really get the message out about their purpose and aspirations.
Identifying students with potential was difficult, as was attracting them to Bradford, and Bradford needed to find a lot of them as it was a university, not some sort of small niche college more suited to this kind of social experiment. In reality, they were never really able to develop a kind of critical mass of these students or build on their reputation to attract the do-gooding middle classes with better grades to study alongside them. This also made teaching difficult.
Their approach killed them in the university rankings which were becoming more prevalant at the time and which focussed heavily on entry tariff points. The rankings didn't care that Bradford was taking students with 3 Cs who could, under other circumstances, have got 3 As. They only cared that Bradford's students had 3 Cs and ranked Bradford accordingly. Consequently Bradford's poor ranking stopped them attracting both the students with potential and the middle students they had previously attracted and they basically just spiralled further and further down the rankings, being passed by many of the former-polys who were attempting to break free of their technical college image and market themselves as 'proper' academic institutions.
They also suffer, like Hull and Keele, from being a non-RG pre-92 at a time when RG/non-RG has started to matter more than the pre/post 92 designation and being in a place that is not particularly attractive to out-of-area students but having a relatively small pool of very local students for whom they are the nearest university.