What we know about 2024’s university applicants

Every year, Unite Students surveys university applicants for our Applicant Index. And every year, we’re surprised by the differences between applicant cohorts. If you want to be prepared for the first year students who will arrive into your city in the autumn, you won’t want to miss this episode – or the report that spawned it.

Hosted by Jenny Shaw (Higher Education External Engagement Director at Unite Students), our expert panel looks at the ever-shifting impact of the pandemic on this year’s incoming student cohort, how they’re feeling about their finances ahead of coming to university, the specific needs of working class and disabled applicants, and what this will all mean in practical terms for universities and student accommodation providers.

Our panel includes:

• Dr Michelle Morgan, Dean of Students at University of East London
• Professor Tony Moss, Pro Vice-Chancellor Education and Student Experience at London South Bank University
• Will White, Higher Education Engagement Director at Unite Students

We’re also joined by special guest Nick Hillman, Director of HEPI, who shares his reflections on this year’s findings and some of the stand-out stats that caught his attention.

You can listen to the episode, or read the transcript, below.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are the personal views of individual guest speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Unite Students and/or Unite Group plc. 

Episode transcript: ‘What we know about 2024’s university applicants’

Applicant 1: I felt like I missed out on a lot of my teenage years. Time kind of stopped, and now all of a sudden I’m supposed to be going to uni.

Applicant 2: It put a pause on my learning. I felt robbed of two years of growth and development.

Applicant 3: I feel like I wasn’t able to gain exam skills during my GCSEs, which then reflected on my performance at A-level.

Jenny Shaw: These are just some of the comments from this year’s higher education applicants talking about the impact of the Covid pandemic on their lives. They come from our recently published Applicant Index and they paint a picture of lost learning, uncertainty and anxiety. And this is backed up by the numbers. This year’s applicants enter Higher Education with lower confidence in their academic skills, weaker social networks and more concerns about finance. But on the plus side, they are more confident about their graduate employability.

Welcome to Accommodation Matters. I’m your host Jenny Shaw and, as usual, we’ll be talking about the big issues that affect student accommodation and the wider student experience. And today we’re looking ahead to a new intake of undergraduates who’ll be arriving on campuses and in student accommodation in just a few weeks’ time.

As usual, I have an expert panel here in the studio to discuss all of these things. Dr. Michelle Morgan is Dean of Students for the University of East London. Hi Shell.

Dr Michelle Morgan: Hi Jenny. Thank you for inviting me today.

Jenny Shaw: You’re very welcome. And Professor Tony Moss is Pro Vice Chancellor at London South Bank University. Hi Tony.

Professor Tony Moss: Hi Jenny. Thanks for having me on.

Jenny Shaw: You’re very welcome too. And Will White is Higher Education Engagement Director for Unite Students. Hi Will.

Will White: Hi Jenny. Good afternoon everyone.

Jenny Shaw: Great. So we are talking today about the transition to university and the needs of this year’s new students. But to start with, I’m going to ask each of you for one thing that really stood out for you from the Applicant Index. Shell, do you want to kick us off?

Dr Michelle Morgan: Yeah – can I just say, Jenny? I think the report is absolutely excellent and I think it just triangulates with research that’s already out there such as the pre-arrival academic questionnaires I’ve done for many years. And I don’t want to say it’s comforting to see the responses, but when you see consistency of findings across different datasets, it becomes a powerful evidence base for change. And I think we all know that the sector’s so poor in understanding prior learning experiences of their students and they focus on exit metrics rather than the students coming in.

So this is so timely and so powerful and there were two surprises for me, I think. One of them was about international applicants and Chinese students who significantly were less likely to be interested in the social side compared to domestic. And at UEL, I see this at postgraduate level but not undergrad.

And the other bit of data, which was fascinating and I think so important, was the data about consideration, about withdrawing. And although 17% may not seem a lot in terms of thinking about withdrawing, it’s still a lot and as the top two reasons given which are finance and lack of confidence, what are institutions doing to bridge activities where we can proactively support our incoming students?

Jenny Shaw: Yeah, thank you. And that point about the Chinese students, I was quite surprised to see that as well and I wonder actually how much of that is culturally mitigated, because we know that they do enjoy social activities and make friends and make networks as well – but I wonder how much of that is kind of what they think is expected of them. Tony, what stuck out for you?

Professor Tony Moss: Two things particularly that jumped out at me. The first was this sense of loss that students talk about carrying into Higher Education, recognising the lost learning opportunities that have come from prior stages of study. And I think that’s really important for us in the sector to think through, I guess in terms of what it is that we can put in place to help support students that may be carrying almost an emotional sense of loss. They genuinely seem to feel they’ve missed out on certain things.

So, to what extent can we help them to have those sorts of experiences and opportunities to develop that they feel they’ve missed? But at the same time also what does that mean in terms of the actual skills and things that students are bringing to us when they come into Higher Education now? So I think that’s a really interesting challenge for us as a sector.

The other thing I’d be really keen to talk a lot more about this is the slight increase in students who have disabilities who don’t intend to share that information with their university. It’s worrying to see a trend in that direction that students are maybe feeling less confident or less willing, less able to share that information, because we know that’s such an important thing for us to be able to ensure that they’re getting the support they need when they come into Higher Education.

Jenny Shaw: What do you think would make a difference, Tony, in terms of encouraging people to share that information before they arrive?

Professor Tony Moss: I mean part of the issue is I guess trying to understand why it is that students would not disclose that information. And I think what comes with that is a sense of trust. So we know that applicants may not disclose that information because they’re worried that it could negatively impact on an offer that’s made to them. And so I think there is work that could be done to try and help, but inevitably you’ll always have some students that have that worry. It’s just a worry whether it’s rational or otherwise.

I think what’s key – and it’s something that I know lots of institutions have different approaches to – at LSBU, we have a personal development plan that we ask our students to complete and actually we get quite a high number of students declaring that they have a disability that they didn’t declare to us during the enrollment process or the application process.

So there are different things that we can do. One is trying to build that trust early on in the cycle, but the other thing that we can do is to say, “Well actually, just because you’re choosing not to tell us – if we can’t completely make you feel confident that it won’t affect your application, then fine – but let’s make sure we’ve still got opportunities for you to declare that information to us once you’re here and as early as possible so we can put support in place.”

Dr Michelle Morgan: I agree, Tony, and I think there are other issues, Jenny, at play. We know that through UCAS, more disabilities are disclosed and mental health is one of those, but we still have major issues with international students not disclosing because it’s a cultural issue. We have males particularly not disclosing and so, as Tony said, how do we actually target groups of students who may be aren’t disclosing?

Through providing them with confidence that actually their application won’t be affected, it’s not considered a weakness and it’s really, really important that this kind of area that they may experience challenges in needs to be identified so they can actually receive the support to help them succeed.

Jenny Shaw: Absolutely. Will, what came out of the report for you?

Will White: Well two for me again. If I start with a positive – so, that stat about employability confidence that you referenced at the outset. So 40% of this year’s applicants are very confident they’ll get the job they want after graduation. So that’s great; shows that increasing focus on the outcome as a means to financial stability. I suppose that’s the flip side of that coin. Speaking to the financial pressures that this cohort are facing into, given that it’s going up in terms of their confidence, that’s a positive trend.

The negative, and it was quite shocking to me, is just this continued rise in applicants missing school due to mental health reasons, up to 36% from 30% last year and 39% amongst UK students. Obviously, much more profound for different groups, be they female or LGBTQ students or those from a lower socioeconomic background.

But I do find that incredibly sad that that’s a trend that is continuing to rise, especially given all of that lost learning under Covid and just the idea of that vicious circle where potentially the missing school is compounding that feeling of anxiety and the sense of falling behind, which I think is also really clearly called out in the data. Just from a parental point of view, I think it’s really tempting to think that you are failing when your child doesn’t want to attend school. But I think the data tells us really clearly there is a widespread issue here which is affecting how children feel about the school experience.

I can just imagine lots of stories behind the data about families trying to make that work, whether that’s children being at home and for younger children, childcare issues or the sort of stress that that’s displacing onto families themselves. So yeah, that was really hard to read actually.

Jenny Shaw: Shell and Tony, I’m just wondering if you were surprised by that stat. I mean it’s over a third isn’t it, saying that they’ve missed school due to mental health?

Dr Michelle Morgan: Yeah, unfortunately for me it’s not such a surprise because I introduced very similar questions 18 months ago into the pre-arrival academic questionnaire. But when you start seeing it at national and not institutional level, it’s really quite stark and it’s a real temperature check, Jenny, of the challenges that we are facing.

We know there’s ‘ghost children’, they’re being referred to at school. And the problem, is how do we deal with a cohort of students coming in who’ve achieved the qualifications to get into university but have only attended maybe 80% of classes? They will have that mindset: “Well, I achieved having only attended 80% or less of classes, so why is there a requirement that when I come to university that I have to attend everything?”

And so that’s going to be quite a challenging element for us to explain to students the importance of, and maybe look at how we require students to attend. Can they do lectures online but where the real learning happens in the workshops, in the labs, in the seminars – maybe that’s where we actually timetable them so they are on a day and students can attend all day to really attend those sessions that have real, real impact on the learning?

Jenny Shaw: And Tony, what else can universities do to address this? I was very struck actually by something that Shell just said, which is around timetabling things all on one day. Because we’ve also seen in the data that applicants are working quite a lot and we know that that’s the case for current undergraduates. Does that affect the way you timetable and approach attendance?

Professor Tony Moss: I think it does. I mean we’re talking about the experiences of young people coming from other stages of education where they’ve experienced challenges, particularly around mental health that are impacting on their ability to participate fully in education.

I do think as part of the national conversation on mental health that there is a risk that we see it almost as mental health being the problem that we’re seeing. We’ve got a cohort of young people, people coming into university with a higher rate of mental health issues and challenges and support needs, and therefore we’re thinking about what we can do to help them.

My take on this is maybe slightly different. The reality is we aren’t seeing an increase in severe diagnosable mental health conditions. What we’re seeing is a really big increase in the number of people who are experiencing quite rational mental health responses to situations which are causing them to feel overwhelmed – so people feeling extraordinarily anxious, depressed, ruminating, worrying, and so on and so forth. And so while we can’t change the way that people feel, we can change the way that we’re treating them.

My interpretation of the data that we’re seeing through the Applicant Index through other sources nationally is that, actually, there’s an existential question for us as institutions around: what is it we can do to create environments which are not provoking those sorts of symptoms? Because the reality is, cost of living isn’t getting any easier at the moment. And maybe it will in the future, but it isn’t going to immediately snap back and suddenly students are not having to work the number of hours that they need to.

There is a huge amount of pressure on people coming into university in terms of their lives outside. And so the idea that HE can almost carry on doing things the same way it always has, but hopefully just keep referring students onto the mental health and wellbeing teams to put a bit of support in place when things are getting difficult, I think, is the wrong approach.

We do need to start asking ourselves more challenging questions about the way that we do things. What does Higher Education look like? What are the expectations that we set? That involves asking some quite big questions, but particularly might be around things to do with assessment. For example, we can optimise the timetable as much as we want. If at the end of the term or semester, students have got four or five long pieces of work to submit and they just can’t get the whole lot done because it’s too much – and actually, it doesn’t matter if they could come in for one, one and a half days a week during teaching time.

So I think there are some big challenges for us as a sector to say that the demographic in terms of the experiences of students has changed so significantly. So how are we going to change? How will what we do look different to what it did 10 years ago, given that actually the genie’s out of the bottle a little bit?

Dr Michelle Morgan: I agree, Tony. I mean we seem to have this image of the perfect student who experiences no stress and pressure, and we’ve got to move away from that. I mean, it’s crazy. And it’s healthy when people are educated and taught how to recognise stresses and strains and how to manage it. We need students to have real models. We don’t need marketing role models, and I think the sector’s been very much driven by that to kind of get the student numbers up, especially in challenging times like now. It’s a natural human issue, pressure.

And so if we’re not able to say to students, “Hey look, do you know something? We know you’re having to work, and you may not be able to attend, but also be mindful of all the skills that you are accruing from that part-time work that you need to undertake. Don’t just think it’s there to get money.” Try and get them to think about it as part of their study journey, because it is. It is.

And so if universities can’t get students to enhance all that knowledge, that skill, that ability and get them to recognise what they’re learning in their part-time work what they’re actually bringing into their study, then we are missing a trick I think.

Jenny Shaw: Yeah, I think that’s a really good point Shell, and I’m actually surprised it’s not being done more. When I was at Middlesex University – and that was in the 90s! – it was obviously very cutting edge at the time, but there was a module on learning from part-time work, which students could take as an elective. And it was much more rare in those days to be doing part-time work, but if they were doing that work, they could articulate their skills and get that kind of educational value out of it, and then it kind of disappeared. So I think time to bring back some of these ideas from the past maybe.

Dr Michelle Morgan: No, I agree. I mean I was a working class, first generation female mature student who went to a polytechnic in the 1980s. I had to work, I had to make those tough decisions about attending one lecture on a Wednesday morning when I had the opportunity to work for money.

And so disadvantage has always been there amongst our students. We just haven’t necessarily looked at the level of disadvantage until more recently as the disadvantage affects more and more students across all the different social groups. I think that’s where basically it’s taken traction because the disadvantaged in recent years have always been forgotten, but let’s embrace that knowledge and that experience and actually help all students.

I mean, Tony mentioned about having to make tough decisions. You’re absolutely right, Tony. So two years ago at UEL, we introduced automatic extensions – so almost like two get out of jail cards. So colleagues would identify eligible pieces of coursework, and if a student was right up against the wall and there was a piece of work that they had to get in because there were clashing deadlines, it means a student can use an automatic extension.

Do you know something? What has been phenomenal as I’ve analysed the data over the last two years is the number of extenuation or mitigating circumstances have gone down by a third, which creates less work for absolutely everybody, less stress for the student because they’re not having to try and find evidence and submit it in time for exam boards. And so I think there’s things that we can be more savvy about and clever about in terms of supporting students and also the workload of our staff.

Jenny Shaw: Which is a whole other topic! Will, I’m wondering what this might mean for student accommodation. I know I’ve already been asked by a colleague, does this mean that more students will be spending more time in their student accommodation and what does that mean for us? What do they want out of that accommodation? Is it changing the expectations?

Obviously we know not all students move away from home, but for those who do, could it be the start of a new type of relationship with the place that they live?

Will White: I think what I took from the data was that this sense of belonging, creating that within their home is more critical than ever. Half of all the applicants this year are concerned they won’t fit in and this cohort are telling us that they’re less socially confident as well.

So at Unite Students, we’re using that knowledge to shape how we welcome students. We are thinking more and more about co-creating events, comms, policies with students from different demographics to ensure we include everyone and providing more opportunities for every student to tell us how we can support them better.

And then our resident ambassador event programme that now covers four key themes again which are all, I think, picked out well throughout this year’s Index. So wellbeing, community, life skills, sustainability. And that’s shaped by the Resident Ambassadors themselves with support from our wider teams, again based on student feedback, Community Living Guides – not new, necessarily, but something that every flat will have to encourage respectful communities.

We’re taking the research that is being led by our interns and our Resident Ambassadors, and also building in the recommendations from our Living Black at University research.

We talked to the outset a little bit about pre-arrival disclosure and I agree that there is a real challenge about students having the confidence to want to tell us, but again, we’ve broadened the opportunities for students to do that. So the disclosure form that we send out to every student that gives them the opportunity to tell us anything that we need to note support their stay. So it could be accessibility needs, it could be who their trusted contacts are. It could be if they need an earlier check-in in case they find that mass check-in experience overwhelming.

And finally, our new app – residents can be added to their property community page. So that’s a place for asking and answering any questions peer-to-peer, interacting with that wider property community, but also allowing staff to advertise events and key notices. So, really just helping make a more dynamic way of building out those communities within properties.

Jenny Shaw: Yeah, there’s a lot going on. I’m a really big fan actually of that pre-arrival disclosure form. One of my daughters is applying to university this year and you would be surprised or maybe you wouldn’t, how difficult it is to get the right information and to get just the right process for being able to talk about the disability she has and the support she needs.

It’s been a lot harder than I would’ve imagined, and I think there’s something about asking for that and having that as a standard part of the process and a very sort of well communicated upfront one that just sends that signal that, yeah, this is something that we are really serious about and we want to put that in place and we’ve got processes for it. Because that’s not always there.

Yeah, we’ve sort of touched on some of the inequalities that have come through in the data – I think that’s been a really big finding for me. Tony, you’ve done some really good work in this area. Are there any quick wins do you think that would make a difference to students?

Professor Tony Moss: In terms of the welcome and belonging differences that we see? I think one of the quick wins to some extent is accepting that it’s actually a completely normal thing that there’ll be lots of students coming into HE who won’t feel that they belong. They shouldn’t feel unwelcome, but they won’t feel that they belong because almost all students are in one way or another joining a new community. And it would be very unusual, wouldn’t it, to walk into any community and immediately feel that you belong.

You might feel really welcome, but until you’ve worked out the lie of the land, whether that’s starting a new job, whether it’s moving house and living in a new community and so on, but belonging is something that takes time. So I wonder on the discussions that we have nationally and across the sector around belonging, whether we’re necessarily being clear what we mean by that.

Sometimes when students are saying to us that they may feel that they’re not belonging, I think that says more about the extent to which they feel that they’ll be supported to be able to develop that sense of belonging – not that there’ll be an instantaneous ‘I’ll turn up and there’ll be some posters of people that look like me and that will make me feel like I belong’ feeling. Belonging is a human interaction and it’s something that builds up and takes time.

If there is a quick win, it’s that we maybe as individual institutions across the sector should be really thinking quite carefully about, what are the things that we’re doing to help create the environments in which that sense of belonging can form? And it is about the effects that we can organise at the start of the year, extended induction activities for students who come in late from clearing that might miss out on some of those earlier social opportunities.

But also, actually, it’s probably thinking much more about what it is that we’re doing in the classroom because one of the things that will make developing a sense of belonging really difficult – and I hear this from our students at London South Bank very often – is that they love the activities and things that we’re laying on, but very often they feel they can’t participate in them because they’re coming in for their class and then they’re rushing home to pick up on care responsibilities or to go and do a shift at work and so on.

So there’s a lot more that we can do in the classroom developing those interactive higher value activities that you can do when you’re teaching and not just assume that belonging is something that’s a nice to have.

Jenny Shaw: I was really struck though, Tony by how classed those expectations of belonging and welcome were and to quite a shocking extent actually. And I think probably in South Bank and in University of East London, it is a very diverse community, but you don’t get quite that much diversity maybe in other parts of the sector. And I know certainly when I was a student, which is a very long time ago, you kind of had to pretend to be quite middle class even if you weren’t. And I wonder if that is still the case in some parts of the sector and what the approach might be there.

Professor Tony Moss: Again, part of this is about the reality, isn’t it? The reality is that there are some institutions that still have very non-representative populations of students and so I went to uni, first generation single parent family from a working class background. I still don’t feel entirely like I belong in the HE sector. I still feel that there are environments that feel a little bit detached from my own upbringing and values and so on. Not in a horrible way – not as in, I encounter values and ways of people’s perceptions and so on and so forth, oh that’s terrible. It’s just different.

I do wonder sometimes where we have those conversations more honestly about the fact that there is just as if you pick yourself up and go to another country and go and study in another country, you’re going to have a massive hill to climb just to sort of work out the culture of that place that you’ve never been to and how you sort of fit in. Unless you spend 20 years living in another country, you may never feel completely that you belong. It doesn’t surprise me at all to see that there is that very kind of classed element to the extent to which people feel that they’ll feel that they belong.

I think the part that actually should trigger much more reflection for us across the sector is actually the question on feeling welcome – it seems like what students are saying to us, particularly from working class backgrounds and low socioeconomic backgrounds, is that I don’t know if you’re going to want me there.

And that’s something that I think should be quite alarming, that sense of if you are going to a so-called selective or elite institution or whatever from a non-traditional background, I would like to feel welcome. I’d like to feel that my experiences and my background and the perspectives that I bring, I’d like to feel that I could express those views without somehow being made to feel deviant and so on.

So for me actually the belonging question is unsurprising and to some extent of less concern and actually the biggest gap in the data is ‘I’m feeling welcome’, that students coming from socioeconomic group E, it’s 53% compared to 73% from socioeconomic group A. That to me feels like a really significant gap and one that we should be thinking quite carefully on.

Dr Michelle Morgan: I agree, Tony. I think it’s about that sense of feeling, isn’t it?

Whether you look at belonging, you look at mattering, you look at welcoming and does one have to come before the other? Do you need to be made to feel welcome and to feel like you matter before you can start to feel a sense of belonging? What steps do we actually need to be able to create that umbrella feeling of a sense of belonging? Because belonging is going to be unique to everybody depending on whether you’re a mature student, you’re on campus, you’re in university accommodation, you’re a commuter, but it’s about providing a framework that allows people to build a relationship and for us to create a relationship.

One of the problems that I do have with the sector is we have so much data and we don’t use it. If we use data in a more clever way to actually look at our student body and how those different characteristics with the research that we know impact on them being able to engage, them being able to get onto campus, being able to maybe join in extracurricular activities, then we are better placed to be able to maybe put those group community activities within the curriculum as group activities, because they haven’t got the opportunity to go and have a coffee after class – they’re having to shoot off to get the bus or the train back home.

I think we need to make much, much better use of our data and I think we’ve got as a sector to stop pushing students through the eye of a needle that they all have same prior learning experience of A-levels at school – because they don’t. We have such diversity coming through. I don’t think we are being nuanced enough in really understanding the characteristics of those different students who take those different qualifications.

We know students who take BTECs are more likely to be from ethnic groups, more disadvantaged, and so it’s the disadvantage that they’re coming in, not the qualification that creates many of the challenges and the problems, and maybe – as Tony says – that imposter syndrome.

Jenny Shaw: Yeah, thanks. There’s something that’s occurred to me as we’ve been talking – that teams in accommodation are often quite diverse actually in terms of their socioeconomic backgrounds and their ethnicity and so on, and I’m just wondering if you’ve got any thoughts on this Will.

Because actually, they can provide maybe more of a bridge and a welcome and a point of connection for incoming students who come in and feel like – “Yeah, this is very different to what I’m used to and there won’t be people like me here,” but actually maybe one of the first people they’ll meet when they walk in is someone from a similar background. What are your thoughts on that?

I’m putting you on the spot here Will, but I just wondered if maybe we should celebrate the diversity that we have in our frontline teams.

Will White: Absolutely. At Unite Students, we want our frontline teams to reflect the diversity of the communities they’re part of and the students they serve. I know from my time as Head of Operations, we’ve got such a huge variety of backgrounds and experiences in our property teams.

So any day you’ll be working with graduates and highly qualified SMEs to people who’ve made a career looking after students across our sector. Through summer and check-in, we bring our support teams out to the frontline to help with the summer turnaround so that all parts of the business getting the ‘back to the shop floor’ experience of what it’s like to work in our teams and to serve students directly. And it’s also great fun.

So, whatever their background, we want anyone coming to live in one of our homes to feel that the teams working there get them. So that’s obviously a massive focus for how we recruit and train our people.

Jenny Shaw: Absolutely. Shell, I know you’re an absolute expert on the transition to university and the first year experience. Is there anything that you think, from this data and from other data you have, that really should be dialled up or introduced for this year’s cohort?

Dr Michelle Morgan: Yeah, honestly I thought the report was it provided such powerful, insightful data. Jenny, I mean congratulations to the team for pulling it together because it really has given the sector insight, and I think if we don’t address it then we’re failing our students.

And I don’t know if any of you read the Wonkhe piece by Jim Dickinson, he was talking about duty of candour and – whether we do this at institution or national level because of the Bristol case – we make no attempt to take on the kind of data that Unite Students have produced through this report. Then in fact, actually I think we are failing our students and it is about – I go back to -look at our students and just try not to look at them as a ‘one size fits all’, because we really have to be more nuanced about our student body.

And I have to say Jenny, one area I found particularly fascinating and I don’t cover this in my institutional PAQ due to size, was about the apprenticeship findings. And this is a real area of lack of information. Just before we came on, I was saying that Liz Thomas and myself, we met up, we started talking about apprenticeships because a daughter has just finished her A-levels and is not thinking of going to university but wanting to do her work. So they’ve been looking at apprenticeships and it started the whole conversation of, well, who actually does apprenticeships?

And when you start to look at them, there’s real diversity. And so Bolton and Lewis, I dunno if you read the report, but it came out looking at apprenticeships, and what they were basically saying is if you are a higher degree apprenticeship at level six or seven, you’re going to be over 25, you’re more likely to be male, you’re more likely to be white and you’re less likely to be from the most deprived areas.

When I was looking at that finding in the Unite Students report, which said 45% of applicants who qualified for free school meals say financial issues affect their mental health, but the figure is much lower for those applying for degree apprenticeships – it could very well be because of the age, because of the gender and the fact that we know males are less likely to disclose health issues. And it could also explain the finding that those who were apprenticeship respondents stated that they less likely had family to turn to and maybe that’s because they’re older.

So I think that whole area is really fascinating, Jenny, and I think your research has kind of opened up an avenue for us to explore. And I think that one thing, going back to the apprenticeships, that colleagues may not be aware of is that we are starting to see apprenticeships creeping up. We’re starting to see UCAS’ data of 18 year olds applying to university slowing down. In January 2023, government implemented and updated the provider access legislation where schools and it’s compulsory in schools.

They now have to make sure that students have compulsory encounters with other providers such as those who do T-levels and have much more access to information about apprenticeships and other opportunities and not just about university, but they’re also being told more about the debt and the implications.

And so we may very well be finding that some of the reasons and the worries of students coming in is that this is now being told to them under the provider access legislation in schools. It’s compulsory in schools, it’s voluntary in further education.

Jenny Shaw: Earlier on I caught up with Nick Hillman who’s the director of HEPI and one of the collaborators on the Applicant Index. Let’s hear what he had to say.

Nick Hillman: Look, I love this survey and I love it partly – not because of my current job, but because of my first job after university. My first job after university was being a secondary school teacher and I did run a pre-university course. This is going back to the mid 1990s. And the level of information available and the understanding of what young people were expecting about Higher Education at the time was minimal to non-existent.

If you look for example, at our other really big survey, the Student Academic Experience Survey that we do with Advance HE, it shows a big disconnect between what people think Higher Education is going to be like and what it’s really like. And I think that’s really useful to them themselves, but also to their teachers, their parents, careers advisors and to universities.

Jenny Shaw: And we have seen some definite changes in confidence and behaviour this year. Is there anything that particularly stood out to you?

Nick Hillman: There are changes in the data this year and I think some of them are interesting. I mean some of the ones linked to employability and how young people are a little bit more confident about the labour market, which partly reflects the reality that students – including sixth formers sometimes – now have to have jobs on the side. And that has positives because it makes people more employable.

It also has negatives if those extra hours of paid work on top of your academic work, either as a sixth former or as a student, are disrupting either your academic work or indeed your ability to do extracurricular activities.

I was also struck by the finding that people’s concerns around the financial situation, the cost of living, might be corrupting – and I use that word carefully, but I do use it – people’s choices about what and where to study. Because the way the UK system is meant to work is that everybody gets similar entitlement to maintenance support whether it comes from government or parents or whatever, and that frees them up to study anywhere in the country they would like to study.

We’ve already seen in recent years, for example in London, far more students choosing to live at home and go to their local university for financial reasons. And I’m worried there’s some data in the survey that suggests that that could be affecting more and more people.

Another thing that really stood out for me on the survey, and it came up a lot in the webinar that you and we at HEPI jointly hosted on the day of the launch of the Index, is this point about data sharing. Because it’s not always the case, but it’s often the case that data sharing between a school or a college and a university can be really positive. So if you have particular needs, and your teachers and your staff at your school or your college really understand you as a person and your needs, and that information can be shared with the university, that can be very positive.

But I think one almost shocking finding in your Index, I think, is the high proportion of applicants who think this data is routinely shared when it just isn’t because of data protection. And there are good arguments on both sides. There are good arguments for sharing it. There are bad arguments for sharing it, at least without people’s permission – but there seems to be an expectation that this information is shared very often when it simply isn’t.

And any applicant or parent or teacher or advisor listening to this, I would all judge them as I do when I go into schools to encourage young people to tell their future university about any needs they have. It may be your university can’t put the support you need in place, but at least give them a chance to do so. And if you haven’t told them that you have needs and priorities, then they at least have a start to be able to try to get some support in place and check in on you once you’re there.

Jenny Shaw: Yeah, absolutely. Mindful of our listeners, is there anything that you think accommodation teams should be doing differently this year?

Nick Hillman: Well, I think that is a good question. I mean, one area of the index that we haven’t yet talked about is belonging and loneliness, and some of the data in the report’s not too bad on that actually, but with a very significant minority saying they’re worried about they won’t belong when they get to university, they might feel lonely when they get to university.

And in all honesty, that was my experience when I went to university in 1990. I bizarrely ended up in a block in my hall of residence that was people almost entirely postgraduate students who were a lot older than me. And I found it quite hard to integrate to begin with. And I think those of us who had that experience should talk about that because it normalises it. And in the end, my three years at university were among the happiest three years of my life and I loved it, but it took time for me to find my feet.

And when I look back on my Higher Education, and I think this is true for very many people, many people, I actually don’t think so much about the lecture halls. I think more about the friends I met in my accommodation, the social life I had things that brought reward and personal fulfilment by my Higher Education very often came in the living space. And so I think it’s the same old messaging really of what can you do to make people’s diving into Higher Education as smooth as possible?

And it might be social events; it might be personal relationships; clarity of knowing where to get the support; making sure when you have the right procedures, they are actually applied. It came through in your Living Black at University work that sometimes the procedures written down were actually pretty impressive, but they weren’t always being followed through in practice. So the staff and the students need to know what those procedures are and there needs to be transparency and accountability on those procedures.

Jenny Shaw: Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything else that you wanted to say, Nick, before we close the interview?

Nick Hillman: Well, no, not really. Just to say, I mean I think it is a very, very useful survey. I don’t think our goal here should be to get all the numbers back to the pre Covid world, but to make continual improvements.

One thing we haven’t touched upon, Jenny, which some of the media coverage of the report on was the proportion of people in your survey – by definition, they’ve submitted a UCAS form, they think university is a possibility – who are saying they still might not go. Even if they say I might not go, and they still go, it’s still useful to know that they were thinking they might not go. That tells us something about uncertainty and nervousness about going and might make them more likely to drop out when they get there. And that would be regrettable.

I mean, drop out rates are very low actually in the UK because in general young people are resilient and do everything they can to avoid dropping out. But I think we just need to watch those numbers very closely. People who are doubting the wisdom of going to university even though they are already on the university track.

Jenny Shaw: Nick Hillman, thank you. We are back in the studio now. I thought it was really interesting to hear about Nick’s time working in a school. We do have a new government, for anyone who didn’t get the memo, and that means that there is potential for new policy. So think with that in mind, is there anything different you would like to see either in schools or further education?

Will White: So I’m definitely going to answer that question as a parent. I’d like to see curriculum change. It sometimes feels like we have the worst of both worlds at the moment, so we’re not doing the basics well enough in English and maths, especially children from disadvantaged backgrounds. But we’re also not prioritising creative and vocational subjects or key life skills.

So yes, I believe we definitely need genuine subject specialists in maths and English, but I’d love to see a big reinvestment into art, music, sport and drama, helping to build confidence and skills such as communication, critical thinking and teamwork. It just feels like there’s too much teaching to test at the moment and too many tests. I think that’s feeding the sense of kids feeling like they’re falling behind, and maybe a lot of them not feeling that their individual talents are being picked out in their lessons and making children not want to engage with school.

So there was a stat in the Index about learning confidence. 43% of applicants saying, I’ll struggle to keep up with my course mates if I go onto university. And you really see that that sense of pressure and the feeling that they’re on this conveyor belt from a very, very young age, which is obviously being fuelled by the constant comparison with their peers on social media.

So I’d love to see the curriculum nurture more of those talents through a variety of assessment methods and for children to gain a more rounded set of skills to help them develop the confidence and resilience they’re going to need throughout their lives.

Jenny Shaw: Thanks, Will. Shell?

Dr Michelle Morgan: I couldn’t agree with Will more. What I see from my end is that we see students coming from school especially where they are being taught to remember and to regurgitate in exams. When you come to university, it really is about learning. And we don’t have in the curriculum enough time -because of the modularised semesterisation that we have to have because we have many intakes a year at some universities – to be able to provide time for students to learn through failing. Failing is not bad. Failing is about learning and there is no slush in the schedule. I think that’s problematic.

I think the other thing that we do have to do as well is fundamentally understand that students are going from a child, legal protected space and, at the age of 18, going to an adult legal space. And it’s very different. We’re asking students to sign contracts, take on loans literally overnight. And I think there has to be better understanding, better explanation to students and to parents about what that all entails.

Professor Tony Moss: Yeah, I think there are, over the last few years as finances have become tighter, institutions have maybe started to have to be a lot more selective about what they can do in terms of widening participation, outreach, activity and so on. But secondary schools in particular I think are finding it difficult to always get the sort of information, advice and guidance they need.

And in an HE sector where actually the range of options that are available to you in terms of what you could do – higher technical qualifications, lots of level four and five study options, not necessarily everything has to be about the degree, whether it’s a degree apprenticeship or a traditional undergraduate degree – I think there’s a lot more as a sector we could be doing to try and provide that support in those earlier parts of education.

Because if what young people are hearing when schools are trying to meet those mandatory targets around the information they have to give, if what those young people are hearing is incomplete or not necessarily completely accurate information about apprenticeships and other sorts of things, that’s just going to keep on driving that disparity in terms of who it is that actually ends up taking up those options.

But I know it’s one of those examples of where it’s quite easy to change policy and regulations – quite another thing to say, well, who’s going to deliver it? And I think there’s a real opportunity there for the HE sector to look again. What is the quality of information, advice and guidance that we can provide, and does it have to be individual providers or could we be doing that collectively across the sector?

Jenny Shaw: Thanks, Tony. So we’re coming to the end of the show now, so let’s have our quick fire last round. What is one piece, very short piece of advice that you would give to new students? Tony, do you want to kick us off with that?

Professor Tony Moss: The most important thing if you’re thinking about coming into university is to really test the places that you are going to and when you’re going to open days and things like that. This time in the year, you’ve been to a lot of them already, but really make an effort to actually try and drill down into the institutions, find out what it’s going to be like to work there, to study there, and so on.

But once you are there, don’t forget that your university’s there to help you succeed. And university’s going to be a much bigger educational environment in most cases than you’ll ever have been used to. People won’t immediately know you by name because there are lots more students at a university than at most colleges – but that’s okay. They’ll get to know you and as long as you engage with us, there’s a lot we can do to support you when you’re here.

So yeah, it’s kind of throwing yourself into the experience and taking advantage of the opportunities that present themselves.

Jenny Shaw: Thank you Will.

Will White: Yeah, I loved Shell’s comment earlier about there is no ideal student. Making the choice to go – you’re absolutely in the best place to all unlock your potential. So stop comparing yourself to your peers. There is no ideal student. Make it work for you, however that looks. Could be laser-focused on your career, could be juggling work, caring, childcare. Could still be finding a bit of time to work out who you are. When opportunities do come that are right for you, take as many as you can.

Jenny Shaw: Thank you. And Shell?

Dr Michelle Morgan: Don’t be afraid to disclose and remember that your learning journey is unique to yourself, so don’t compare yourself to others.

Jenny Shaw: Brilliant. And we’re out of time. Thank you to each of my guests today. You have been a fantastic panel and of course Nick for the interview as well. Thank you to Ed Palmer and Jen Steadman who make this podcast happen. And thank you to our young volunteers that read out the quotes you heard at the start of the show.

If you like the show, please rate us and recommend us to others and we’re always keen to hear from you. If you have an idea of topics we could cover or if you want to come on the show, just get in touch. You can find me on LinkedIn or at jenny.shaw@unitestudents.com. And if we bump into each other at a conference and you want to make me smile, just tell me what you love about this podcast!

We will be back soon with another regular episode and I think at least one bonus episode. Until then, have a fantastic summer and you take care.