‘Talent is spread evenly across Scotland. Opportunity still isn’t’

In 2016, I helped set the targets that still define Scotland’s approach to widening access. As President of NUS Scotland, I pushed for the creation of the Commission on Widening Access and later served as one of its Commissioners.

The ambition, set in 2014 by then first minister Nicola Sturgeon, was simple and stretching: that a child born in one of Scotland’s most deprived communities would have the same chance of entering university as a child born in one of the least deprived.

The flagship target that flowed from that was clear. By 2030, students from the most deprived 20 per cent of backgrounds should make up 20 per cent of full-time first degree entrants.

But this was never meant to be achieved by universities alone. It was predicated on a whole-system shift, one where young people from more advantaged backgrounds felt that college and apprenticeships were genuine first choices, not second-best options.

Nearly a decade on, the Scottish Government insists it is on track. The reality is less impressive. Scotland hasn’t widened access. It has widened the doorframe.

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More working-class students entering higher education is welcome and necessary. But we need to be honest about why the numbers have improved, and what hasn’t changed underneath them.

One factor almost never discussed is Brexit.

Before the UK left the EU, EU-domiciled students were entitled to the same free tuition as Scottish students. Every year, they took up thousands of funded university places. After Brexit, those students were excluded from that pool, but the places were retained.

Since then, the SNP has quietly benefited from the resulting expansion in capacity for Scots-domiciled places. That expansion has helped drive headline progress on widening access and has masked the absence of deeper reform.

This isn’t structural change. It isn’t a redistribution of opportunity. It’s a numerical boost created by circumstance – one the SNP is very content to count but reluctant to interrogate.

If widening access was genuinely working, we would see something more fundamental: a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor.

We haven’t.

At the end of the 2025 UCAS cycle, 16 per cent of young people from the most deprived 20 per cent of the population had secured a university or college place. For those from the most advantaged backgrounds, the figure is closer to 44 per cent.

That is not a system in transition. It is a system entrenching inequality.

There has been no meaningful shift at the top. Young people from the most advantaged backgrounds are not moving in significant numbers into apprenticeships or alternative pathways. This is not a rebalancing of opportunity. It is marginal progress layered onto an unchanged hierarchy.

That was never the vision.

To understand why, we have to look earlier in the system and more honestly at political choices made. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than 2020.

When exams were cancelled during the pandemic, pupils were initially awarded grades based on teacher estimates, which were then adjusted using a model based on schools’ historical performance.

The outcomes were predictable. Pupils from deprived communities were disproportionately downgraded. The then-education secretary, John Swinney, stood by the system until public outrage forced a humiliating U-turn.

That episode revealed something important. Inequality in Scottish education is not accidental. It is baked in, and too often defended.

There is also a part of this story that is routinely neglected: Scotland’s college sector.

Colleges play a central role in widening access through delivery of Higher Education qualifications including HNCs and HNDs. Yet this “Cinderella sector” remains underfunded and undervalued, despite doing much of the heavy lifting for working-class students. If the SNP were serious about fairness, they would stop cutting colleges and guarantee progression from them.

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Instead, we are left with a system that continues to advantage those who already start with the most.

Yes, there has been some progress. But widening access was never meant to be about hitting a target. It was about equalising chances. That change is not happening at the scale required.

Scotland deserves better than a government that mistakes expanded capacity for fairness. Widening access should be about changing the rules, not just making a little more room within them.

A Scottish Labour government would take a different approach. We would maintain free tuition, but we would also recognise that fairness isn’t only about university. It’s about genuine opportunity across the whole system.

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That means valuing colleges, apprenticeships and vocational routes as highly as degrees, and creating thousands more high-quality apprenticeships as first choices, not fallbacks.

Because talent is spread evenly across Scotland. Opportunity still isn’t.