Hub for SUCCESS responds to Scottish Funding Council Consultation on the Report on Widening Access

The Hub for SUCCESS has responded to the Scottish Funding Council consultation on the Report on Widening Access (RoWA), which seeks views on how Scotland’s national widening access data can be strengthened to better support policy and practice.

Read our Response here

Our response draws on insight from across our network, including care-experienced learners, practitioners, and partner organisations. It brings together lived experience and professional expertise, reflecting the Hub’s work supporting care-experienced learners to get in, stay in, and thrive in further and higher education.

The Hub for SUCCESS recognises the value of the RoWA as a national dataset. We highlight its strength in tracking progress over time and providing a broad overview of participation, retention, and outcomes across Scotland. The inclusion of widening access groups—such as care-experienced learners, SIMD20 students, and disabled students—plays an important role in identifying inequalities and monitoring change.

However, our response emphasises that the RoWA must evolve to better support action and decision-making. Feedback from our community highlights that the report can be difficult to navigate, with dense information and limited interpretation. The Hub is calling for improvements to ensure the data is more accessible, meaningful, and usable in practice.

Key recommendations in our response include:

Improving accessibility and clarity – through clearer structure, better use of visuals, and concise summaries to highlight key findings and trends.
Strengthening interpretation – ensuring data is accompanied by clearer insight into what it means for policy, practice, and learners.
Reflecting real learner journeys – including more data on progression, non-linear pathways, interruptions to study, and re-entry into education.
Increasing visibility of part-time and flexible routes – recognising these as critical pathways for many widening access learners.
Enhancing data access through interactive tools – including strong support for the development of user-friendly dashboards that allow data to be explored more easily.
Balancing breadth and depth – ensuring expansion to new widening access groups does not dilute meaningful analysis of existing priority groups, particularly care-experienced learners.

The Hub for SUCCESS supports many of the proposed changes within the consultation, including increased reporting on part-time students, broader coverage of undergraduate study types, and greater disaggregation of deprivation data. There is also strong support for including learners on shorter college courses to better reflect the full range of participation across Scotland’s education system.

At the same time, the Hub highlights the importance of maintaining a coherent, joined-up picture of the learner journey. While proposals such as separate reporting on student journeys could offer deeper insight, they must remain clearly aligned with wider reporting to avoid fragmentation.

A central theme of the Hub’s response is that data must drive action. While the RoWA provides valuable insight into national trends, its impact depends on how effectively it informs change. Strengthening the link between data, lived experience, and practice will be essential to ensuring that widening access efforts translate into improved outcomes for learners.

The Hub for SUCCESS remains committed to working with the Scottish Funding Council and partners across Scotland to ensure widening access data is meaningful, accessible, and responsive—supporting the shared goal of an equitable education system for all.