SPECIAL FEATURE Exeter University Focus
“As a university, we want to educate and help young people from all backgrounds, so we have some ambitious targets for over the next 5-10 years as a part of the University strategy. This is mainly to try to enrol more state school students and more students from disadvantaged backgrounds.” Exeter University is an amazing university, but one of the challenges that we have had is with attracting talented young people from all backgrounds. If you look at our intake, it tends to be from quite privileged schools, whether state or private schools, so whilst we don’t want to put anyone off from applying, what we do want to do is encourage more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to come to Exeter and to give it a try. It is something that we have been thinking about TURN TO PAGES 14 -15 to read about getting the best out of maintained schools
for a long time. If you look at our admissions, they are very skewed towards a particular demographic. As a university, we want to educate and help young people from all backgrounds, so we have some ambitious targets for over the next 5-10 years as a part of the University strategy. This is mainly to try to enrol more state school students and more students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We are also looking at mature students. There has been a real drop in the enrolment of mature students across the sector. One of the things that we were thinking about, is how do you help young people when they get to university as well? It’s not
»
EDUCATION CHOICES MAGAZINE | S PRI NG 2022 | 35
