BLOG: The Civic University: How Universities Can Represent Their local communities

By Charlotte Hallahan, Senior Policy and Communications Officer, The Brilliant Club
This blog is part of our NEON Summer Symposium 2024 series. 

Universities often have complex relationships with their local communities. The connection between ‘town and gown’—between a university and the place it inhabits—can be fraught. Despite sharing bus routes and supermarkets, there is sometimes an invisible wedge between university populations and local communities. However, universities are increasingly thinking about how they can act as ‘anchor institutions’, becoming more representative of local people and working with their communities to tackle localised barriers to educational and social inequalities. This blog post explores the importance of the ‘civic university’, when institutions develop a shared civic mission in partnership with their broader community, which in turn builds trust with those communities, and especially with local parents and carers.

The importance of parental engagement

At The Brilliant Club, we believe that parents can be valuable co-creators with higher education institutions. Parents hold important insight to the challenges and barriers faced by local families. We also know from our own parent work that they can be powerful agents for change, especially when organisations that hold power and influence can provide the knowledge, tools and connections parents need for effective political engagement.

We already know that parental engagement in education is important: The Education Endowment Foundation estimates that parental engagement helps young people make an average of 4 months’ additional progress in education, with higher impact for students with lower prior attainment and younger students (EEF, 2021).[1] As well as this, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that parents and carers account for almost 50% of the factors that influence the socio-economic gap in education at the end of primary school (IFS, 2022).[2]

Despite the proven benefits of parental engagement on educational outcomes, many parents feel pessimistic about the prospect of university study for their own families. Last year, The Brilliant Club published polling in collaboration with Public First that showed that 41% of parents believe that it will be more difficult for their child’s generation to attend university than their own. 71% of parents also said they would need help in guiding their child through a university application. The parents and carers we work with often tell us that they don’t feel that university is necessarily ‘for’ them: ‘University’s never really entered my head’, one parent from Fenland told us, ‘because it doesn’t really ‘exist’ in my world’.

For many parents, it is the financial challenges associated with university study that are the most daunting, and parents are increasingly worried about the impact the cost-of-living will have on their children if they decide to go to university. Parents told us that they believed that the cost-of-living is the most important factor for their children when deciding on a university to go to, above university reputation. Parents and carers also want to see a fairer student finance system—the polling tells us that 75% of parents want to help the least-advantaged students when they get to university through the reintroduction of maintenance grants.

Parent Power

Through our Parent Power programme, The Brilliant Club empowers parents and carers to combat educational inequality in their local areas so that they can make positive change for their children’s future. It does this by creating Parent Power ‘chapters’ — parent and carer communities that are supported by an anchor institution. The chapters are trained in community organising so that they can campaign to address issues in their local areas.

Now counting thirteen chapters in Abbey, Oldham, Fenland, Knowsley, Cardiff, East London, East Oxford, Peterborough, Newport, Birmingham, South London, Norwich, and a Spanish speaking chapter, Empoderando Familias, the parents themselves decide what activities will benefit their communities and children. Parent Power chapters across the UK have arranged tailored university trips, received training on student finances and secured bursary places at summer schools.

We know how and where a young person grows up influences the educational opportunities available to them, including their attainment and progression to higher education. The Education Policy Institute recently found that areas with the largest gaps in attainment – the South West, North East, and North West – have only seen disadvantage get larger since 2019 (EPI, 2024).[3] Our Parent Polling also shows that Parents in the North (Yorkshire and Humber, North East and North West) are the most pessimistic about the chances of children in their local area to attend university, compared with children in the rest of the country.

Given the evidence that educational inequality is linked with specific areas in the UK, it is feasible that working within local communities to enhance civic engagement could potentially improve place-based outcomes. Community organising is a method that addresses social justice issues by organising marginalised groups in local communities to bring about broader societal changes. We also know that when parents engage with institutions like universities, they become more aware and confident of their civic missions and the role they play in addressing local challenges.

The Cardiff campaign for contextual admissions

In October last year, for example, a Cardiff parent group successfully campaigned for Cardiff University to improve how it shares information on how students can apply for contextual admissions. Cardiff Parent Power’s campaign was born out of a realisation that many local parents either weren’t aware of contextual admissions offered by universities or weren’t able to access information on how they work. This meant that, for many of the parent leaders, the process of campaigning was also a process of learning. The campaign was, ultimately, a success: Cardiff University agreed to implement all five of the recommendations that the parent group made. This means that Cardiff University will now run outreach events for pupils in local schools, include contextual admissions policies in the prospectus and on course profiles, and will develop a promotional video about contextual admissions.

This was an important step for Cardiff Parent Power, but the parent leaders also hope that this will be a crucial first step in the university sector – that more institutions take an important lesson from this campaign and begin to listen to their own communities when considering if their widening participation policies actually work.

Parental engagement can build trust between a university and its local community: the parents we have worked with through Parent Power describe how much more comfortable and welcome they felt on university campuses after something as simple as a meeting with university representatives. The same parent from Fenland told us that being invited to be part of Parent Power has ‘opened up’ the world of university study, and also provided them with a ‘partner’ to confidently explore and address it: ‘I feel there is a path for us to follow now and we have been included in this “conversation”’. By actively involving parents in university activities, and recognising them as important and influential stakeholders, institutions can empower families to create lasting, positive change in their communities.

Find out more about Parent Power by contacting our Director of Communities, Jimmy Pickering at jimmy.pickering@thebrilliantclub.org

[1] Parental engagement | EEF (educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk)

[2] Education Inequalities (ifs.org.uk)

[3] Annual Report 2024 – Education Policy Institute (epi.org.uk)