28 January 2025

Lessons in Access

Author

Claire Swales
Access to Higher Education Diploma Officer, QAA

2024 was a big year for the Access to Higher Education Diploma (AHE). Last year at QAA we celebrated the registration of our first million students onto AHE courses since we started managing the scheme for the recognition and quality assurance of this provision in 1997.

The Access to HE Diploma has long been recognised as a valuable route into higher education for adult learners. It offers specialist provision in subjects often not covered by other forms of foundation provision – including areas in which the development of a highly skilled workforce is seen as increasingly vital, such as medicine and nursing.

This transferable qualification is long-established and widely recognised by universities as an alternative to such traditional Level 3 qualifications as A Levels and BTECs. It is designed to cater for individuals from diverse educational and socioeconomic backgrounds and with varying experiences in their lives.

And students who have paid for their course using an Advanced Learner Loan can benefit from a scheme whereby any balance still owed on completion of an eligible higher education course is written off by Student Finance England.

Last October saw the publication of a guide to AHE study written by former AHE student Zoë Chapman. Zoë graduated with a degree in Biochemistry after completing her AHE Diploma – and went on to teach Biology on an Access to Higher Education programme. She has worked in HE, FE and secondary schools, taught on apprenticeship programmes and developed corporate training and CPD provision. She now works as an academic at The Open University.

'I feel very privileged to have worked in so many education sectors,' she told us this autumn. 'All that experience has reaffirmed to me how unique and important Access to HE is, what high quality provision it is, and how pivotal it can be in someone's life. I wouldn't be where I am today without Access to HE.'

We at QAA are understandably proud of our record of 27 years of oversight of this provision, its contribution to widening participation in higher education and its capacity to transform so many people’s lives.

2024 saw more than 26,000 new students registered onto approximately 1,300 AHE courses run by 180 providers across Britain. In addition to traditional classroom delivery, many (by continuing to deploy and hone pedagogic practices developed by necessity during the height of the COVID-19 crisis) also offer options of remote and hybrid engagement by which their students may complete their courses’ standard 600 hours of learning.

This isn't the only way in which the options for modes of study have developed over the course of this decade. In 2018-19, only 16 per cent of AHE students were studying part-time. But, in the three years since the 2020-21 lockdowns, the proportion of part-time Access to HE learners increased – in steep but steady year-on-year increments – from less than a third to more than half of all learners.

During academic year 2023-24, 54 per cent of AHE students chose to pace their learning over more than a single academic year, with many electing to spread their studies over a period of about sixteen-to-eighteen months.

Part-time study of course allows students to maintain their commitments to work, family and carer responsibilities. The demand for this approach to learning is reflected in the findings of our own latest research.

We at QAA recently conducted a survey of more than 700 current AHE students. Our survey revealed that, prior to the commencement their courses, significant proportions of those prospective learners had felt concerned about the amount of time they would need to commit to their studies.

Those aged 20-34 identified the costs of study and the cost of living as having been key considerations when deciding to return to learning, while those aged over 35 say they had been more focused on the impact their studies would have on their families and their family lives.

It seems significant that the proportion of AHE learners studying part-time peaked at the height of the cost-of-living crisis. This academic year, with inflationary pressures somewhat diminished, this has settled at 42 per cent – the same level as two years ago.

A study by The Open University published last November found that nearly two-thirds of mothers want to retrain for a new career, but money, time and parental responsibilities tend to hold them back. There are clear gender disparities in relation to the capacity and willingness of such returners to learning to engage in full-time study.

This is why it is so vital that Access to HE provision includes part-time routes – as about three-quarters of AHE students are female – just as almost two-thirds of all part-time students in higher education are women.

AHE course providers and their students have discovered the evident benefits of flexible delivery options – whether through part-time study modes, distance or hybrid learning, or alternative start-dates.

Indeed, approximately 180 AHE courses scheduled start dates for early 2025 – across a broad range of subjects including teaching, nursing, law, sports, business, policing, criminology and digital technology.

Part-time study allows learners to take positive steps towards realising their ambitions while working or raising their families – or both.

Providers at all stages of post-compulsory education have seen how opportunities for flexibility in delivery can offer benefits in relation to equality impacts, widening participation, lifelong learning, student recruitment, resilience, retention and attainment.

The lessons we have learned about these benefits mirror an increasing understanding across the tertiary sector of how best to support the engagement of new cohorts of learners with very different expectations and needs from those of previous generations, as post-compulsory education adapts to the challenges and opportunities of a socioeconomically, demographically and technologically new world.