"The sector cannot survive on starvation rations, and without more investment, sixth form colleges will be unable to provide young people with the high-quality education they need to progress to higher education and employment".
The milieu is distinctive, but the challenges facing the school, its students and its staff – lack of funding, overstretched facilities, large classes, a dearth of teacher training, children failing to progress to secondary education in sufficient numbers – reflect a pattern discernible across many developing regions.
Universities already work to raise the aspirations of disadvantaged pupils with academic potential, but increased marketisation of higher education risks seeing outreach activity focus disproportionately on pupils soon to progress to higher education (where the immediate gains are most obvious).
This magical engagement with learning eventually led Joe to progress to higher education (the first in his family) and on to a job with a well-known research company.
But despite these significant financial inequalities, the report also suggests that students in sixth-form colleges are more likely to achieve better exam results and progress to higher education than their peers in academy or maintained school sixth forms.
She is a trustee of the Access Project, which supports young people from deprived backgrounds to progress to higher education, and of the National Star Foundation, which provides specialist care and learning support for young people with physical and learning difficulties.
The universities minister, Jo Johnson, writing in the Guardian last month said that while almost 40% of young people progress to higher education, the figure for white boys from the most disadvantaged backgrounds is just 10%.
In an article for the Guardian', the minister writes: "Almost 40% of young people now progress to higher education by the age of 19, but the figure is just 10% for white boys from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, who are five times less likely to go to university than those from the most advantaged ones.
Although she said it was "very positive" to see almost half of the students realise an apprenticeship is a good, and more cost effective, way to help them progress to higher education (45.5 per cent), she described how it was "worrying" to see how many wrongly believe they are only useful for people who have no academic skills or want to drop out of school early (34.3 per cent).
In measuring progress to universal education, a narrow conceptualisation of access which dichotomises children's participation as being in or out of school has often been assumed.
