Enhancing pupils' aspirations to university: the St Andrews Sutton Trust School experience

Abstract

The Sutton Trust Summer School offers to S5/Year 12 pupils the opportunity to sample student life for a week at one of five selecting universities in the UK. Most of the participants on the Sutton Trust Summer School will be the first generation in their family to attend university and have come from schools which traditionally send low numbers to university, especially the most highly selective universities. This paper examines the impact of the Sutton Trust Summer School on its young participants' aspirations towards university and to the University of St Andrews in particular. We find some unanticipated perceptions of such pupils regarding entry to higher education. A quarter of them, for example, are not in fact aware of any barriers to attending university. However, we show that Summer School attendance provides a significant confidence boost, especially for those who were initially worried about participating. For young males, friendship networks are an important source of information about the Summer School.

Keywords:

• widening access
• summer school
• aspirations

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous referees for their constructive comments on this work, The Sutton Trust, the participants of the STSS, Mike Johnson and Joëlle Lasselle for their help in collecting the data. Laurence Lasselle gratefully acknowledges the British Academy's financial support. All errors are ours and the views expressed in this paper are ours and do not represent those of the University of St Andrews or of The Sutton Trust.

Notes

1. Definitions are collated in the appendix.

2. As selected in Sutton Trust (2008a, p. 6) – see Appendix 1.

3. All figures are those given by Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

4. Recently confirmed by Dr Richardson in the Times (10 March 2009).