With limited financial resources, universities must choose between investing in widening participation or research facilities – and some are making the wrong decision, a vice-chancellor has suggested.

Sue Rigby, principal and vice-chancellor at Edinburgh Napier University, said more funding is needed to support disadvantaged students to enter and succeed in higher education, but warned that this is unlikely to come from government. 

“It won’t come externally, so we’re going to have to find it within the university sector,” Rigby told the 51�Թ� Student Success UK and Ireland conference in Edinburgh. “So the real question is: jobs or support for widening participation students?

“There is no other germane question: do we build a supercomputer or do we support widening access? Because the pot is finite and, at the moment, the voices mediating for widening participation are weaker than those mediating for diamond anvil”.

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She continued: “That’s not just within universities; it’s externally. So we need to be held to account for this and we need to be held to account by our regulators, by government and by the public.”

Rigby also said that universities should be lobbying for more funding for early years education, even if that means the higher education sector receives less money, because attainment gaps start from a young age.

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A by the Sutton Trust, for example, states there is “a substantial gap” in development between “the poorest children and their better off peers before they start at school”.

As a result, said Rigby, universities are “mopping up the failures of the care and education systems”.

David Phoenix, vice-chancellor of The Open University, said: “One of the challenges across the four nations is the shortage of funding and the fact that, if you’re going to invest in early years, which is certainly one of the directions that the English government is currently taking, you’re looking at 10, 15, 20 years before you see a result.

“Therefore, you’re arguing for something without having actually gotten the evidence of impact.”

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Rigby also suggested widening participation should be included in league tables. “If we could move up the rankings by demonstrating success in [widening participation], you would find an awful lot more vice-chancellors bringing you round the table and saying: ‘What do we need to do to help?’”

However, she argued that the current political climate is making advocating for widening participation harder.

“This is both under-resourced and a contested space because, in an environment where woke is suddenly a bad thing to be, what we’re looking at is a question about: ‘Well why don’t we take bright middle-class children who don’t need support? Surely they deserve the places in your institutions.’

“All of a sudden that’s a live issue when a lot of us thought that we’d stamped on that snake and buried it about 15 years ago, but it’s back and it won’t go away unless we as universities have a concerted belief in the importance of this work.”

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helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com