Help improve equality of opportunity

We ask universities and colleges to build their approach to equality of opportunity around evidence and evaluation. An important part of that is including the experience of a wide variety of current students.

Access and participation plans focus on students from a wide range of backgrounds, and the risks to equality of opportunity that students from different backgrounds experience. It's crucial that students from those backgrounds are involved in the design, implementation and evaluation of the plans.

Your university or college should be actively seeking your input and involvement in developing their plan, but you can also have your say independently of them through the student submission.

Why are student submissions important?

We will need to make a decision about whether or not to approve your university or college's access and participation plan, and a student submission will help us to do this. In the student submission, you can give your views on both the content of the plan and on your experience of being involved in its development.

The submission should provide additional insights on the access and participation plan from the students' perspective in a way that is:

• more direct
• separate from the access and participation plan
• more current than the OfS data which is based on retrospective figures.

Your submission will give you another opportunity to influence how your university or college addresses risks to equality of opportunity, and ultimately how well all students access, succeed in, and progress from higher education.