Christine Ennew, Provost, gives an update on an extraordinary year for Confirmation and Clearing.

Transcript

"This was always going to be an extraordinary year for Confirmation and Clearing, and it became even more so with the release of a second, revised set of A-level results from UCAS a little over a week after the release of the first set. So I wanted to tell you a bit about what happened, why and where we are now in terms of our expected numbers of new students.

Confirmation and Clearing Round 1 was socially distanced with the team spread throughout Rootes and the Steering Group meeting virtually. All of our colleagues on campus were protected by face visors produced specially for them by a team in the School of Engineering and were looked after with a steady supply of refreshments from our friends in CCSG. The Clearing Hotline was managed by a team of volunteers from across the University who did sterling work. Thanks to all of you!

And alongside all of these challenges, of course it was the hottest week of the year, something which, I think, was only partly mitigated by regular supplies of ice cream.

We’d known for a while about the likely impact of the now infamous algorithm and we made a conscious decision to look even more carefully at our near misses, especially those who were flagged to indicate they might be in a Widening Participation category – and this included underperforming schools. Widening participation is the general term we use to describe our work to encourage under-represented groups into higher education.

We went into clearing for a small number of subjects. But when we had our final steering group meeting on Friday 14 August at 4.30pm in the afternoon we all felt comfortable with the outcome and it was all over bar the shouting……or so we thought.

Come Monday morning…… well although there was no official announcement, we all suspected that Confirmation and Clearing Round 2 was about to start. We’d seen a u-turn in Scotland 10 days previously; it wasn’t long before the Welsh Government changed its position and it was only a matter of time before the same was announced for England. Which of course it was, later that afternoon.

For the team who’d been working intensively during Round 1 of Confirmation and Clearing and were hoping for some breathing space, this felt a bit like someone had pressed the reset button!

We didn’t actually have to go back to square one, but it was a huge amount of extra work – I’d like to say a big thank you to all our recruitment and admissions staff, who really did go above and beyond.

No student was asked to defer and we managed to stay below the Government imposed student number control limit (although this was actually abandoned as part of the u-turn). We probably accepted a further 350 students as a result of the policy change – we could have taken more but we didn’t, because we wanted to be sensitive to capacity constraints on campus.

Throughout the process, we stuck to our widening participation commitments. We’ve had a record number of acceptances across many underrepresented groups, most notably students from the lowest participation neighbourhoods and students joining our pre-entry WP access routes. We’ve accepted over 100 students from these programmes, almost half of whom came from our flagship Warwick Scholars programme, which provides academic support and mentoring to students in Years 12 and 13 to help prepare them for University life. And if we compare progress against this year’s widening participation targets, we are doing particularly well on the BAME measure.

If you’d like to see the specific figures relative to target, have a look at the transcript for details, but in brief we’ve pretty much met two of our targets and we’ve exceeded a third, which is a great outcome.

Ratio of entry rates for Polar 4 quintiles Q5:Q1	Target 7:1	Actual 7.5:1
BME students from Polar 4 Q1 and Q2	Target 6%	Actual 12.2%
Entrants from schools in Coventry and Warwickshire	Target 3.5%	Actual 3.2%

(Latest figures – subject to change)

(POLAR is about measuring whether a student comes from an area with low participation in higher education – or high. And the lowest polar quintile is students who come from areas with historically low rates of participation in higher education.)

What does all of this mean?

Well, overall, we look to be in a good position; we have recruited well and responsibly and we have not exceeded the previous number cap. And we’ve done well in terms of encouraging access to higher education for under-represented groups. Our EU and International numbers look good (although there is huge uncertainty about how many will choose to come or be able to come).

It's probably too early to say what this means in terms of our finances; the fact that we are likely to do better than we had assumed is good news – this should reduce the size of our deficit for next year. But of course until students arrive, we really don’t know and it is more uncertainty than normal. As for me, well, I’m optimistic that we will do well with our home undergraduate student numbers. I’m bit more nervous about EU and international students although the numbers look good. And we shouldn't forget the postgraduate students – probably our area of greatest uncertainty. But for now, it’s a case of “so far….so good”. And that made me pretty happy on the approach to the Bank Holiday weekend (which is more than could be said for the weather).

The undergraduate side of recruitment and admissions has gone really well – so many people have contributed to making this a great success; and if I haven’t mentioned you previously then thank you and if I have mentioned you, thanks again."

Christine Ennew

Provost