**2. Widening Participation in Ireland and the UK**

This section explains the access to higher education (HE) landscape in Ireland and the UK. Higher education access policy in both countries was developed in the late 1990s under the term 'widening participation' (WP). The approach to WP in both countries shares similarities. 'Targeted programs' between schools and universities were funded by government from the 1990s onwards. In both cases, regulatory frameworks have emerged to monitor and incentivise HEIs to further diversify their admissions intake. Unlike the UK, Ireland has remained a comparatively low-cost HE system, and maintenance grants are still available to low-SES students. While Ireland has a much smaller HE system, there has been much greater collaboration across the Irish HE system in developing shared admissions systems to target low-SES students.

#### *2.1. Access to Higher Education in Ireland*

In Ireland, 93% of students attend a state secondary school and 7% attend a private (fee-paying) or independent school. Ireland has recently launched its fourth National Access Plan. Secondary-school completion rates have risen to 90% and 64% of young adults progress to higher education [6]; however, a number of surveys show that there are significant, and persistent, disparities in social class participation in higher education [6–12]. Twenty-seven per cent of low-SES students progressed to higher education in 2017 [13]. In 2020, there were 4.9 students from disadvantaged areas to every 10 students from affluent areas [6].

Higher education institutions (HEIs) focus on widening the participation rates of low-SES students through a combination of educational outreach programmes and diversified admissions routes. The standard outreach model provides a range of educational opportunities, including visits to the HEI's campus, learning supports, foundation courses to help bridge the gap between school and HE, and contextual admission routes to access "targeted" places in HE institutions.

Ireland embarked on a policy of funding "targeted" widening participation programmes between schools, community groups and HEIs in the late 1990s. These programmes focused on sustained outreach to schools and communities, alongside the development of contextualised admissions systems, which allowed for admission of low-SES students at lower tariffs than those from more advantaged backgrounds. HEIs agree targets for students from low-SES backgrounds as part of their "performance based compact" with the Higher Education Authority (HEA). The compact is an agreement across a range of institutional metrics, and it forms the basis of discussions between each HEI and the HEA to determine state investment levels. This is similar to the role played by the Office for Students (OfS) in England in incentivising institutions to diversify their intake.
