Your article on university admissions policies (Universities must ‘look beyond’ results to enrol poor students, 1 May) neglects to mention one method of improving access to higher education, which is the widespread use of unconditional offers for pupils predicted to achieve the highest A-level grades.
These schemes have proliferated as UK universities scrambled to exploit a dwindling resource of fee-paying 18-year-olds. Unfortunately, they may have the predictable effect of narrowing rather than widening access. Success breeds success for the more privileged but without the need to achieve the actual grades required from other, less privileged, students. Such dystopian ironies have been generated by market forces and fetishised by the competitive ideology of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017.
Prof Graham Mort
Burton-in-Lonsdale, Lancashire
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