Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of the Participation of Local Areas metric for improving access and participation in higher education.

The Participation of Local Areas (POLAR) classification groups small areas across the United Kingdom into quintiles based on the proportion of young people who participate in higher education (HE). The most disadvantaged classification group, quintile one, has the lowest rate of participation in HE and quintile five has the highest rate.

POLAR is a measure of educational disadvantage and has value in identifying areas of low participation in HE. The Office for Students (OfS) encourages providers to use POLAR in their access and participation activities more broadly to assess inequalities and to set their own targets.

Where providers have clear evidence that POLAR does not reliably reflect disadvantage in their specific location or context, they may use an alternative measure of disadvantage. Additionally, the OfS have developed the association between characteristics of students’ dataset and analysis, which providers can use to identify and target disadvantaged and underrepresented groups within HE.

Information on POLAR is available here: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/young-participation-by-area/.