UK universities should be required to admit set numbers of students with different levels of attainment to end the academic and social “polarisation” of the sector, according to a sector leader.

Writing in a Higher Education Policy Institute report, Tim Blackman, vice-chancellor of the Open University, argues for the introduction of a sector-wide minimum entry requirement and the reintroduction of student number controls, at institutional and course levels, “with random allocation if a university is oversubscribed”. This would represent a return to “a more planned and less marketised system that could take into account skills needs as well as student demand and save hundreds of millions of pounds currently devoted to marketing, regulation and access initiatives”, Professor Blackman says.

To improve diversity, Professor Blackman proposes “stratified quotas, using different bands of prior attainment so that a mixed-ability intake is created for each university and course”.

The , published on 23 January, is a response to a previous Hepi paper, written by Iain Mansfield, a former civil servant who is now head of education, skills, science and innovation at the thinktank Policy Exchange, which called for greater selection in secondary education.

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Professor Blackman argues that the UK should instead create a comprehensive university system, like much of its schools sector, highlighting the pedagogical benefits of mixed-ability education as well as the social ones.

“If academic selection at age 11 is wrong, then it is unclear why it is right at 18 for university,” Professor Blackman says. The “prestige accorded to very selective institutions attracts students with high prior attainment, often enabled by multiple socioeconomic advantages, denying these students to other institutions and polarising the sector academically and socially”, he argues.

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These students, Professor Blackman continues, “are generally easier to teach” and have fewer support needs. Universities that recruited them “also tend to attract…academics wanting to focus on research performance, further adding to their prestige”, he says.

When students with different abilities, identities and experiences learn together, it “creates valuable opportunities for peer learning but also encourages mutual understanding and inclusion”, Professor Blackman says, benefiting both high and low achievers.

And he argues that current attempts to improve diversity do not go far enough, saying that contextual admissions – discounts on entry requirements for disadvantaged students – “are small and the offers further cream off students from less selective institutions”. Such steps are unlikely to capture “the variety of reasons why a student fails to achieve their full potential at 18”.

Other authors in the report also challenge Mr Mansfield’s assertion that students are more likely to attend a highly selective university in the UK if they were educated in an area with grammar schools, questioning his methodology and highlighting that it does not take account of the potential damage done to students who do not get into selective schools.

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Mr Mansfield suggested that “unconscious bias” among largely Labour-voting “educational experts” could explain why academic research has been so overwhelmingly against grammar schools. But Vikki Boliver, professor of sociology at Durham University, and Queralt Capsada-Munsech, lecturer in education and social inclusion at the University of Glasgow, write in the Hepi report that Mr Mansfield’s advocacy of grammar schools “seems to be driven by an ideological commitment to competition and hierarchy” – or unconscious bias – rather than evidence.

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com