**4. Results and Discussion**

This section explains the outcomes from the comparative case study (CCS) which considers two programs: Programme A—TA21, a whole-school, educational outreach programme and Programme B—LMH FY, the collaborative development of a foundation year for low-SES students, between Trinity College and LMH in the University of Oxford (2016–20]. It also compares the development of contextualized admissions processes in Ireland and the UK. It discusses how these were framed by and within specific policy contexts and how TA21 operated as a community-based programme focused on change at a school level, whereas LMH FY was a university-based programme, focused on change in higher education.

This CCS poses two questions:

(1) How did the admissions processes in both universities change to target low-SES students?

(2) How do social and academic support services for low-SES students, provided by two universities, contribute to the development of student capabilities?

Table 2 below identifies the key features of comparison across the two programs, and these are then explained.

**Table 2.** Comparing change between a community-based and a university-based education intervention to improve low-SES higher education access.


*4.1. A Comparison of Socio-Economic Indicators Used in Admissions Processes in Both Universities to Target Low-SES Students for HE Admissions*

While national policy had incentivised the development of "targeted programs" for low-SES students in Ireland and the UK, in the early 2000s, there was no agreed definition of "educational disadvantage" or the low-SES students who were to be targeted, and neither was there a system within the universities for doing so. In both programs, there was a need to define the socio-economic indicators that would serve as proxies for educational disadvantage. Trinity College Dublin had developed a set of national policy-based indicators for the TAP FC. The Higher Education Access Route (HEAR) emerged from this evidence base, and it was built and tested in close collaboration with two other universities: University College Dublin and Maynooth University [37]. Both universities and the Dublin Institute of Technology collaborated to develop a nationwide systems-based scheme. It was agreed across the sector that no single indicator would be sufficiently robust to qualify a student as eligible to compete for the targeted places in HEIs. There were both individual- and grouplevel indicators and they combined financial and socio-cultural proxies. Six indicators were ultimately agreed upon across the HE sector, and students had to meet at least three indicators to compete for a targeted HE place. HEAR was scaled from a local, manual process to a university-wide system in 2012. It is mainly through HEAR that each university recruits low-SES students to meet their SES targets. The six socio-economic indicators used in the scheme combined individual (e.g., family income) and group-level (e.g., geo-code) information linked to "disadvantage", which together functioned as a "proxy definition" of educational disadvantage.

This was an important development in moving contextualized admissions from a local, manual process with considerable subjective input on a university-by-university basis, to a systems-based, nationwide online application system that combined individual- and grouplevel data. The rationale for including both individual- and group-level indicators is that it enables more effective targeting of HE admissions processes at those low-SES students who need it. For instance, not all individuals living within a low-participation postal code is from a low-SES background, and there are low-SES students within high-attainment schools, and high-attainment postal codes. Combining a range of indicators enables a more

effective targeting of the students who have had a complex and disadvantaging experience of education. These were represented in Table 3 below.


**Table 3.** The Higher Education Access Route socio-economic indicators for low-SES students [27].

This system has now been in use across the Irish HE system since 2012, and it is integrated within the shared application infrastructure used by all HEIs. Students apply to any HEI and provide documentation which is uploaded to the system and reviewed by a collaborative team nationwide. Students must meet certain academic thresholds for each course and institution in addition to the socio-economic indicators.

This learning was used by LMH in Oxford, where there was no agreed set of common indicators for selecting low-SES students across the university and there was an anecdotal view that the students who were being selected as "low SES" did not meet that definition. This was because the indicators used to assess socio-economic status leaned towards grouplevel indicators, such as POLAR or ACORN (school and postal-code progression), rather than integrating a focus on the SES of the applicant. This risks allocating highly competitive places to students within these postal codes or schools who may come from better-off, educated families. The LMH FY team did considerable work, drawing on national policy, to develop a robust system for selecting low-SES students. Through literature review and an iterative process of testing, the LMH Foundation Year team identified a set of socioeconomic indicators to act as proxies for educational disadvantage in the UK. Using these indicators enabled LMH to identify students whose socio-economic background was likely to have had an impact on their GCSE and A-Level grades. Current Higher Education policy suggests that such contextualisation is key to widening access [36,37]. See Table 4 below for more details.

While there are differences in the socio-economic assessment systems, there are some similarities. Both systems take a multi-indicator approach to assessing low SES. In both cases, this means that the targeted places within HE are more likely to be used for low-SES students. This individual targeting, or "contextualisation", was essential, as it enabled the LMH FY team to make a strong case to the university to modify the admissions requirements for the LMH FY, as it provided a holistic context for previous socio-economic circumstances having impacted on low-SES grade attainment. While there were concerns in the university that the assessment of both individual- and group-level proxies would be resource-intensive and unmanageable, it helped to be able to refer to HEAR in Ireland, where the application system is online, and documents are reviewed by a trained team nationwide. In Trinity, this multi-indicator assessment process began with the TAP Foundation Course in the early 2000s. The objective was to demonstrate to Trinity College Dublin that low-SES students could thrive in the university if given extra academic, personal and social support for a year prior to admission to first year, and that there was a robust alternative to identifying and supporting their potential. Within five years, the student academic attainment and retention within Trinity was so strong that this multi-indicator approach was tested for low-SES admission directly to the first year of university. By 2012, this developed into a national scheme, HEAR, alongside all other universities in Ireland. The collaboration between Trinity and LMH in Oxford enabled the use of this evidence base from Ireland to effect change in the University of Oxford. In some respects, LMH FY is now in the place TAP was in 20 years ago, aiming to scale the FY across the university and to establish a more robust approach to socio-economic assessment of low-SES students.


**Table 4.** The LMH FY Oxford University socio-economic indicators for low-SES students [36].

A\* denotes the highest academic grade a student may achieve in the English second level school system.

This section has described the development of socio-economic assessment systems within the context of admission to the University of Oxford and Trinity College Dublin. It explains how the evidence base from Trinity was used to strengthen the case for change within Oxford. It highlights how the indicators varied in both contexts, as they are drawn from nationally verifiable data sources; however, in both systems, a multi-indicator assessment approach is taken to better target the low-SES students who are most likely to need academic "contextualisation" and a year-long foundation course to address gaps in their schooling.

#### *4.2. Community-Focused Change, versus University-Focused Change*

The next point of comparison between Trinity and Oxford is in their approach to change. The TA21 programme emerged from the evidence base in Ireland regarding the grade attainment in higher education of low-SES students who had been given additional supports at entry to higher education. The students were found to perform as well, and in some cases better, than their non-low-SES counterparts [27–29]. This precipitated the TAP team to consider how much more untapped student potential was within their partner schools and to consider how to build a closer partnership with the schools to engage every student throughout their time in second-level schooling and to aim to address some of the gaps highlighted in the literature (limited educational guidance, an absence of educational role models, a limited range of subject choices, lack of money for additional educational support). This community-focused change has at its heart the concept of how best to use the university resources to support change within low-SES communities. The corollary of that is that students within those communities will be better prepared—in both information and academic attainment—to make informed decisions regarding their post-secondary trajectory, whatever that might be.

The LMH FY case is focused on institutional change within the University of Oxford. It aims for two substantial departures from practice: (a) to establish a university-wide foundation year, based on the success of the LMH FY and to admit low-SES students to

the course at lower academic attainment that those who progress directly to first year and (b) to change the socio-economic assessment process within the admissions process, to better target individual low-SES students. These are the changes that Trinity engaged in within the Irish context in the 2000s. Both are substantial changes to Oxford's admissions landscape, and they have already precipitated comparable changes within the University of Cambridge [38].
