Drive to attract poor students 'failing'

The Goverment's drive to persuade thousands of youngsters from deprived homes to go to university is failing, according to official statistics published today.

Figures published buy the Higher Education Funding Council show that the percentage of students who are recruited from areas with a tradition of low participation in higher education and from working-class homes generally has not budged, despite millions of pounds being pumped into efforts to persuade them to opt for higher education. Ministers accused Britain's elite learning institutions last night of having failed to recruit talented youngsters from deprived neighbourhoods.

Margaret Hodge, Minister for Higher Education, said: "Let's move from ivory towers to building bridges. Our best universities need to get out more and hunt for potential in their communities."

However, many academics blamed the introduction of tuition fees for putting off students from poor backgrounds, and urged ministers to abandon any notion of allowing universities to levy top-up fees.

Sally Hunt, general secretary of the Association of University Teachers, said: "Introducing top-up fees would only make the situation worse."

The minister's intervention stirred echoes of the Laura Spence affair, when the Chancellor Gordon Brown accused Oxford University of discriminating against a Tyneside state school pupil with top A-level grades, who was later accepted by Harvard.

Today's figures show most universities in the 19-strong Russell Group of elite higher education institutions were failing on three counts to widen participation.

Fourteen of the 19 failed to reach nationally set benchmarks for the percentage of pupils from state schools; 14 also failed to reach them for the percentage of pupils from lower socio-economic groups; and 10 failed to reach them for the percentage of students recruited from poor neighbourhoods.